Congratulations Waldo's People!

Finland's representative to the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 has been chosen. The six songs chosen on the first round were oddly separated between 3 songs for the taste of young people and the other 3 were definitely for old people. In this case, like so very often, I regard myself as one of the young :)

Last week I was definitely supporting Waldo's People with their song Lose Control. Waldo won, and here is the song. I think it is just one in a dozen and will not win.

During last week I changed my mind because this song started to fill my head. The group is Signmark and one of the performers is deaf. He is signing the words. I think this would have been something new and memorable in the big list of similar songs. I just love the melody. Here is Speakerbox.

The Eurovision Song Contest representative 2008 for Finland: Teräsbetoni

It seems that after some time the young people have started to take an interest in the Eurovision Song Contest. Two years ago we were represented by Lordi who gave us the victory in the finals with the highest score in the history of the contest. At that point Finland was divided in half: those who were sure that Lordi had good changes and those who thought that Finland would make a fool of herself sending the monsters to the competition. I belonged to the first group and Lordi gave us much more than I could never have hoped for.

Last year Serbia won, but we did not do bad compared to our achievements in history. Serbia's song was a ballad sung in their own language and probably that had caused this year most of the Finnish participants to be Finnish songs.

The competition was very tight. Among the three best were two songs to satisfy younger people and one old Finnish ballad sung by Kari Tapio, who stated that if the competition would take place in Serbia, he would not go. That kind of music I am ashamed of in Finnish music culture. Boring, similar to all the other songs in the same genre and not something you can show Europe.

The winner Teräsbetoni is again a hard rock -band, but this time singing in Finnish. That is actually a good thing. Finnish can be very lyrical, but we have also words which suit hard rock very well. Finnish has often been compared to German where the consonants are expressed much stronger than in English.

Again the speculations started: Everybody will be laughing at us! Wrong!! This is a song we can show the world :)

Proud to be Finnish!

My classes start today and probably that will affect my posting :(
I still have no idea how I could combine blogging and teaching...

Something really fabulous and unexpected happened over the weekend.
Finland won the first EUROVISION DANCE CONTEST (EDC 2007) and thus became the first winner in the 'history' of this contest. I did not watch the show on TV until I happened to pass by and saw the start of the voting.

Finland's dance is spectacular. It is artistic and also a noticable thing is that the music is Finnish by Apocalyptica.

Here is the winning dance:

It was only 1.5 years ago when we won the Eurovision song contest with the biggest amount of points in the long history of that contest thanks to Lordi. Before that we probably were the first in the "worst points ever" - list.

And here is our winning song from there. Monsters and hard rock, something you would not expect a woman of my age to like. Anyway I love it!!. This version is from this years contest opening. Finland hosted them and the show started with this video.