(Click here if you can't see the panel above for some highly forced lunacy…)
Finland did a most curious thing last night. Following last year's most unexpected but welcome success, the entire nation got into a collective brain fog and confused Käärijä's well-crafted gnarly stomp with a bit of awkward knockabout comedy and thought it was voting for more of the same. But it couldn't be more far away from 2023's edgy but funtime hitmaker.
Seemingly a massively local in-joke, Windows95man (in reality a visual artist and DJ called Teemu Keisteri) stamps about in his actual pants, pulling comedy faces while his uncredited sidekick shrieks out an optimistic action film theme tune of a song. It's nostalgia for a time and a place that never really quite existed, but the Finnish locals went absolutely mental for it.
After coming plumb last with the international juries - with only the UK saving its blushes from an embarrassingly low score - it absolutely hoovered up the public vote and beat the expected winner, a pretty decent obsessional break up ballad by Sara Siipola, by a street. But is it any good? We've always recognised that there's a very fine line between being genuinely strange and trying a bit too hard, and we fear that this one had stepped just that little bit too far to the latter. Clearly the fella will have to change both his name and entire iconography when he takes the song to Eurovision proper - which kind of defeats his entire wacky object, the dope.
But having said that, it does have an epic feel that could have everybody watching punching the air against their will without every really quite understanding why. I'll bet the Portion Boys are gutted that they entered last year, cos they'd have hammered this in the public vote. We're always incredibly positive about fun in Eurovision here at Apocalypse Towers, but when it's this forced is it really actually fun?
Some Finnish perspective: W95man has great stage presence and ability to improvise and connect with the audience on his DJ gigs. That part obviously doesn't come across well in the tightly-controlled Eurovision environment.
ReplyDeleteThe Windows bit isn't that important to the character, though. It's more about the 90s and the nostalgia for it (and that's a sentence I'd thought I'd never write). I'm sure he can full it off even if Windows gets banned.
Sara definitely had the best song, no argument there, but Henri Piispanen was fine. IMHO they should be Henri feat W95man 🙂
*pull it off
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