Anoush Chakelian
Don’t get me wrong, Armenia is great at a lot of things. Playing chess. Producing superstar business dynasties.
Stuffing vine leaves. Squeezing pomegranates. All the skills. But
nowhere is it more revered in popular culture (aside from all Kardashian
content) than Eurovision.
Although it’s never won the thing, it has a cult status among
Eurovision fans for always doing fairly well with memorable refrains,
catchy beats and exotic concepts.
My personal favourite was 2010’s “Apricot Stone”, a complicated
mid-tempo lament about childhood, sorrow and fruit. Key lyric: “I began
to cry a lot/So she gave me apricot.” Which says all you need to know
about Armenian parenting.
It’s been in the top ten seven times since its 2006 debut, and has
reached the top five twice – its undisputed best banger “Qélé, Qélé”
(which means, “Come on, Come on”) coming in at fourth place in 2008,
winning the highest number of 12-point scores in the whole contest.
But this year, it seems to have lost its mojo. It failed to get through
in the first semi-final (something that’s only happened to it once
before, in 2011), and was competing with quite an uninspiring one-man
ballad called “Qami” (“Wind”).
When they were selecting their contestant in February, Armenians
thought he’d be a shoo-in, according to William Lee Adams, editor of the
wildly popular Eurovision news site Wiwibloggs. Adams was part of the primetime TV shows selecting the Armenian contestant because of his site’s enormous Armenian following.
“He is a huge star, and he was having his moment,” Adams tells me over
the phone from Lisbon, where he’s covering the contest. “We did think he
was going through, I think everyone did – because of Armenia’s
historical strength. But yeah, the performance was just a bit too
austere. At times I felt like he was singing in a mausoleum.”
Adams points out that this is the first time Armenia has entered a song
that is 100 per cent in the national language – part of a pattern this
year, which has seen the highest number of non-English language entries
in five years.
It’s a reverse of a trend that began after 1999, when the European
Broadcasting Union changed the rules to allow countries to choose any
language (from 1977-98, it was compulsory to sing in your national
language).
This year, 13 entries have chosen a non-English language. It’s a huge change. Last year, only four entries sang in a language other than English.
The shift could be because last year’s winner was a Portuguese ballad.
“There tends to be a trend where the previous year’s winner will inspire
the next year’s competing entries,” Adams notes. This could be the
reason behind usually exuberant Armenia’s choice of a ballad too.
But this isn’t foolproof. Audiences have fickle reactions to national
language songs. “Sometimes when you send a traditional song, a spiritual
song in a non-English language, you struggle to get through,” says
Adams.
In Armenia’s case, as I’m sure is similar with many of the smaller
countries in the contest, the idea of singing in your national language
(which it did partially in its second-ever entry, and a few years after
that) is to showcase your culture to an international audience.
“The thing is to remember with Armenian songs is that Armenian
Eurovision is all about connecting the diaspora as much as it is about
winning,” says Adams, who has been covering the contest closely since
2009. “For them, it’s as much about what they're telling Armenians as
what they’re telling the world.” Although the population of Armenia
itself is less than three million, when the diaspora is included, the population is estimated to be closer to 10 million.
Indeed, Armenia’s 2015 entry was sung by a supergroup called Genealogy
of Armenian singers from across the diaspora (including France,
Ethiopia, Japan and Australia).
As countries continue to ditch English, it will be worth watching how
the results are affected – and working out not only what this means for
the perfect Eurovision song formula, but for Britain’s ever-declining
global status.
"New Statesman," May 11, 2018
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