I’ve watched a few minutes of World Cup soccer football in recent weeks but my viewing is likely to drop drastically as a result of the U.S.’s 2-1 loss to Ghana last Sunday. Although soccer continues to grow in popularity here, it’s still a sport that a lot of people — including some of my friends — just don’t get. At all.
My appreciation for what the rest of the world calls football grew immensely during the year that I lived in Scotland. Although the moribund state of the Scottish National Team these days is hardly worth celebrating, there’s still plenty of enthusiasm for the sport there. I never attended a Rangers-Celtic match but one couldn’t live in Scotland without feeling the heat produced by that sectarian-infused rivalry.
If soccer remains a mystery to my American friends, one can only wonder what they would make the Eurovision Song Contest, another continental institution that I developed a little bit of affection for while living across the pond. It’s like a jingoistic version of American Idol, where singers represent one of the 39 participating countries rather than themselves. Only the pop songs are much cheesier and the talent pool feels a little shallower.
But that summary vastly undersells the entertainment value of a competition so weird and wonderful that you just have to watch to appreciate. I think part of it, as a scholar of international relations, is the benign and relatively predictable geopolitical machinations at play when voters in each country choose their favorite song but can’t vote for their own country’s entry. I remember sitting in a flat with friends from who’d watched the competition for years and just being amazed by how wrapped up they were in it. It felt like attending a Super Bowl Party, albeit one where the observed competitors were elaborately costumed, illuminated by disco lights and often covered in glitter.
Thanks goodness there’s this week’s New Yorker article about last May’s competition by Anthony Lane (deadwood edition only) that seeks to translate the madness for us Yanks. It’s about as snarky of a read as you can find anywhere. But behind the put-downs are merely there to obfuscate the deep affection — against his taste and better judgment — that the writer has for the Eurovision contest. Because you can watch the competition online these days, I have hope that someday maybe Americans will catch some of the Eurovision fever, too.
But perhaps this is one contest that Americans don’t actually want to be the best at winning.