Eurovision

Since I now live in Europe, I find myself drawn in to the Eurovision song contest. On the one hand, it's an international contest even more fraught with under-the-surface (and on-the-surface) politics than the Olympics; one is drawn to root for one's team. But on the other hand, it is a festival of massively-produced pop music. I mean, the live performances use the very highest technology available — massive LED matrices, realtime projection mapping, elaborate robotic sets, even goofy two-wheeled contraptions — and the music is processed to within an inch of its life. Which is actually kind of fun to watch. Of course, all the songs are horrible earworms. So be warned; the video below is lovely and apropos for this blog, but it will be stuck in your head:

Oh, and of course, it's astonishingly gay — the hosts opened with a string of jokes about all the gay fans, and I saw at least as many rainbow flags as I did flags from any nation (should I make that any geographical nation?).

Below the jump I'll post a few others that I particularly liked (that is, they're hopelessly stuck in my head).

A little SF vignette

Canada has these laws that require a certain fraction of the music that is broadcast to be Canadian. This caused a certain amount of screaming from radio stations, but I have this feeling that it actually works, that Canada as a result produces disproportionally more music, and more original music. I don't know about that (how would you quantify it?), but this band — You Say Party — is Canadian.

Virtual idol

Years ago, I'm not sure when or where, I saw the anime Macross Plus, which is about a pop star who is entirely a computer program that sings, but who has fans as devoted as any present-day pop star. Anime being anime, there was of course a whole plot line about her AI going rogue (plus giant robots of course), but I remember thinking "how weird, a pop star who doesn't exactly exist". Well, technology progresses, and sure enough, we have one now.

Dar Williams

I only really started to listen to music in the 90s, so my idea of what music should be is bleeps and clicks, with human voices only in the form of ironic movie samples. (This is of course precisely the range of music that can be made by geeky shut-ins with piles of computers and electronics. Literally, in some cases; I saw this one live.)

But as the result of a hard disk crash (sadly not recorded), I've been listening to a lot of music from other sources lately, and I find I'm really liking Dar Williams. She's got a nice voice, clever lyrics, and how can you dislike someone who writes a song about the Milgram experiment?