ESC Covers, like in previous years, google translated ESC Norge discussion on the Eurovision song contest positions, from Norwegian to English.

This is a blog post and only represents the writer Morten Thomassen’s own views.

Let’s take the positives first. Both the fact that we got to start the final must be seen as a kind of honor to the artist who performs and the artist who performed Kyle Alessandro should have received the King’s Medal of Merit for the effort he put in on stage and in the weeks before the final, because the same kind of focused artist will take a long time to find and to the extent that one should be dissatisfied with an 18th place, none of that responsibility falls on the artist’s shoulders, his effort was worth it.

Now, few of us believed that we had a winning song in the making and the odds put us in the bottom fifth of the results list, so in that sense, 18th place was a bit above expectations, but far from something we should be proud of, and what is the reason for that?

I don’t think Kyle Alessandro really got the real message across in the song “Lighter” in a proper way, and if the commentators in the respective countries hadn’t told us that this was inspired by his mother’s battle with cancer, or that her message about the artist – the light in Kyle’s eyes should never stop shining no matter how things went, it wouldn’t have been possible to understand from the stage performance we saw on stage in Basel.

What made our own song not catch on more than it did was that the song was a bit too typical of a boy band song, vocally it’s mostly okay with a few missteps and the stage show itself is very far from innovative and something we’ve basically seen before and the way the stage show has developed in ESC is a bit old-fashioned, I would almost say.

The Norwegian and Armenian songs looked almost confusingly similar in their respective national finals, but only one of them received a complete renovation, we Norwegians cost ourselves a little renovation and that simply doesn’t hold up in this competition and the only reason we still beat Armenia was probably that our song had just that much more audience appeal.

And one can only wonder why they brought this break dancer, he mostly disappeared into the flames and darkness of the stage and as impressive as he probably was, he probably had little intrinsic value in the performance itself.

There is little doubt that we have the artists and songwriters needed to take us high up the results list, but ESC has and will remain a visual thing too and we have miles and miles to go before we reach a high European level, if you ask me, but I have some faith that the radar couple Tarjei and Mads are itching to get there, the sooner the better.

Featured image – SARAH LOUISE BENNETT – EBU