Eurovision 2010s: 225 - 222
225. Cesár Sampson - ”Nobody But You“ Austria 2018
[2018 Review here]
If I’m honest, I remembered Cesár as worse than this? lol. My critique from last year still stands, though: This is not third place/jury winner material. However, looking at it now I think “Nobody but you” has only one, GIANT glaring flaw to me and that is the staging. I think the act is a giant ball of pretentious, self-aggrandizing, britney mic’ed RUBBISH. It’s distracting and pointless. Like, WHAT IS THIS???
Which of course, allows me to continue down the same paradigm as I have for the past week: “Nobody but you” is actually a pretty competent gospel song, so... why the contrived staging circus? Just let the song sell itself? It’s not like Cesár lacks the charisma to do so.
Of course once Cesàr gets off that stupid platform, the song actually reaches its full fun potential. Watching Cesàr joyfully skip around the satellite ring injects so much life into “Nobody but you” and dear god it needed that. I would assign green status if the staging were just Cesár interacting with the Altice Arena crowd, but it isn’t, sooooo bye.
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224. Daniel Diges - “Algo pequeñito (Something tiny)” Spain 2010
Poor Daniel. Always setting himself as the butt of the joke from the moment he entered Eurovision with a song called “Something tiny”, about “the tiny, simple things in life make people happy”, which the dirty of mind (all of us, don’t lie), of course immediately took as a euphemism for his penis. 🍆
Naturally, the misfortune doesn’t just end there, because Daniel ALSO had to deal with a stage invasion on top of that. 😂 Stage invasions are always asshole moves, but I think the incident broke Daniel. You can pinpoint the moment where turns from ’Fake Nice’ into ’Barely Contained Homicidal Maniac’
Tom Dice later revealed in a Flemish talk show that Daniel had an Actually Scary Meltdown afterwards, spewing profanity and throwing water bottles are nearby handlers <3
So after all of that, I WAS ready to stan ironically and show respect for professionalism, as I’ve done with SuRie, but Spain of course had to accept a reprisal to remind everyone of how silly-nilly and banal “Algo pequeñito” really is. Oh well.
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223. Sinplus - “Unbreakable” Switzerland 2012
Okay, so Sinplus. Here’s the deal with them, and with Eurovision Rock entries in general. Rock is an amazing genre in studio version because of its power spike, but it often transitions into underwhelming lives. It really needs crazy staging, good camerawork or an engaging lead in order to work and Sinplus well... don’t have any of that, lol?
What do they have? Well other than a lot of weird-ass facial expressions (mild <3), Gabriele provides hilariously bad diction:
SWEEM EGENST DA STRUEM. FALLOWEEN YO WALDEST DRIIM, YO WALDEST DRIIM!!! ANBREKABUWL.
However, I need something more to remain invested. You see, 2012 already had a toe-tappingly good rock song in “We are the heroes” and and a comically bad one in “Don’t close your eyes” and both completely cancel “Anbrekabuwl” for me. I still somewhat enjoy Sinplus, but we’ve seen much, much better of their kind.
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222. Marta Jandová & Václav Noid Bárta - “Hope never dies “ Czech Republic 2015
As my ranking has made clear, “Hope never dies” is not the song for me. It’s one of those sentimental drawn out ballads and that’s just... NOT what I’m into.
However, “Hope never dies” has its charm? Vaclav and Marta have decent chemistry and sing really well (the first instance of ANYONE from Czechoslovakia singing in tune at Eurovision lmfao). LOVE the shoe-throwing Marta does near the end. Love that, even though they NQ’d, hope never died for Czechia and they have managed to qualify thrice in the next four years. Czechia are a great example of a terrible ESC nation reinventing themselves and reaping the rewards, and while “Hope never does” doesn’t *pop* for me, I appreciate that it set the stage for a renaissance that will hopefully result in a victory, very, very soon. CONGRATULATIONS TO LAKE MALAWI FOR BEING THE BEST CZECH ENTRY IN THIS DECADE. Not like that was ever in doubt, but ‘gratz all the same. 🤗
The next update will be the FINAL yellow one :o
