Product Description

The world's largest and longest-running song competition, the Eurovision Song Contest is a significant and extremely popular media event throughout the continent and abroad. The contest is broadcast live in over 30 countries with over 100 million viewers annually. Established in 1956 as a televised spectacle to unify postwar Western Europe through music, the contest features singers who represent a participating nation with a new popular song. Viewers vote by phone for their favourite performance, though they cannot vote for their own country's entry. This process alone reveals much about national identities and identifications, as voting patterns expose deep-seated alliances and animosities among participating countries. Here, an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, including musicology, communications, history, sociology, English and German studies, explore how the contest sheds light on issues of European politics, national and European identity, race, gender and sexuality, and the aesthetics of camp. For some countries, participation in Eurovision has been simultaneously an assertion of modernity and a claim to membership in Europe and the West. Eurovision is sometimes regarded as a low-brow camp spectacle of little aesthetic or intellectual value. The essays in this collection often contradict this assumption, demonstrating that the contest has actually been a significant force and forecaster for social, cultural and political transformations in postwar Europe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #285712 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 190 pages

About the Author
Ivan Raykoff is Professor at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, USA. Robert Deam Tobin is Professor of German and Chair of the Humanities at Whitman College, USA.

Customer Reviews

A solid scholarly overview of the ESC
For a cultural institution of such wide-reaching impact, there's been scant scholarship on the annual Eurovision Song Contest. This book, positioned largely in the realm of musicology, endeavours to remedy this. Overall it represents a good overview of the Contest and its impacts.

However a number of chapters contain errors. The current voting system has only been in place from 1975. Juries wholly determined the results each year until 1997. While to some these might seem trifling details, for academics there's no rationale for the sorts of deficiencies that would differentiate first class work from that which merely meets requirements.

There is also a paucity of empirical research--though that could be reflective of the paucity of arts research funding, or arts research on the ESC funding particularly.

But this book is worth reading, if one wants to look at the phenomenon of the ESC with a critical lens.

At last some serious analysis of this much talked about cultural icon
Firstly, if you're a fan wanting pictures, voting tables, gossip and general froth you don't want this book - instead buy John Kennedy O'Connor's 'The Eurovision Song Contest, the official history'. This is a totally different publication. There are no pictures and the writing style is academic, reading like a collection of university theses. Personally I find it a breath of fresh air to see the Contest talked about in terms beyond the usual 'isn't it all so camp?' and 'isn't it all so political?' soundbites. This book is a long overdue recognition that Eurovision, often unwittingly, has important things to say about serious issues such as history, gender, race, nationality and geo-politics. In its 180 pages and 15 chapters the scholars contributing to 'A Song for Europe' offer much food for thought; Turkey's complex relationship with Europe, the inferiority complex of the Finns and their years of Eurovision failure, why the Contest holds such a fascination for the gay community, non-white participation in the event, Communist Yugoslavia's engagement with Eurovision, the unexpected rise of 'ethnic' music styles, to name just some. There are also essays on similar events outside Europe such as the Pan-Arab 'Pop Idol' and the 'Red & White' song contest of Japan, older even than Eurovision itself. 'A Song for Europe' is a great read for all those who have long since recognised that the Eurovision Song Contest is much more than a trivial pop music television show.