ESC Covers have google translated the Norwegian post from ESC NORGE to English.
This is a blog post and only represents the writer Morten Thomassen’s own views.
Before the year ends, I think it might be a good idea to look at some memorable songs from Austrian ESC history, and this time I’m focusing on 1971.
We all know that we have lots of dialects around little Norway, so it’s perhaps not so strange that there are even more of them in the German-speaking part of the world, and for someone who barely understands German, I know that some German dialects are impossible to understand, probably for German-speaking people too.
After singing in German for all these years (with a little English thrown in in 1963), it was therefore a bit special that the artist Marianne Mendt sang in what is called Viennese German (and this should not be confused with Wiener-sausage, you know).
What is perhaps a little strange about this dialect is that it originated in the capital, and if you are to believe what you read on the internet, this dialect is so special that you don’t have to go far from the capital before some of the words used in this dialect are incomprehensible.
But, back to the song “Music”, for us Europeans I would assume that it sounded like music, and cleverly it had a title that is understandable in all languages, and then I would assume that those who listened and watched were satisfied.
However, in terms of placement, this song about music was not much to write home about, it beat our own entry in 1971 “Lykken Er” by only 1 point and then they beat Malta, so the song got third-last place.
The song itself is what I would call a slightly rocking pop song, the lady has an excellent vocal, but perhaps doesn’t appear very TV-accustomed, she looks pretty much every other way but into the TV camera, maybe that’s because she was a fairly new artist at the time, she had released her first single the year before.
Marianne Krupicka, which is her real name, is still active as a jazz singer and has also been an actress, so that lady has obviously had a lot of strings to play on and we can tolerate a re-listening to her song. If you know German, do you understand any words other than “music” in what she sings? I don’t.
Featured image – Youtube