The Chorus - Eurovision voting

My 15-year-old nephew Barry predicted, on the basis of one hearing of their songs, that the heavy-metal band Lordi would win the Eurovision with “Hard Rock Hallelujah”.

He wasn't naïvely saying that it was a great song. After all, he listens to Franz Ferdinand and Coldplay and is a bit of an authority on blues-metal crossover. Nor was he knowingly observing that the Finnish cry for love was manifestly better than everyone else's. He was making, I believe, a rather shrewd political and cultural assessment. I thought it unlikely. This just had to be a joke. I mean, we all know what Eurovision is, don't we? We couldn't necessarily spell it out, but we know what it is. And not only was this not Eurovision but it was so flat-earthist it might have been tongue-in-cheek, post-retro, hyper-ironic hog metal. Except that it wasn't that either. Saturday night was interesting for reasons that transcend the implications of either the Eurovision or pop music – one of those moments when pop culture tells you something that you hadn't previously taken on board. West-European commentators, including Marty Whelan on the night, were too busy throwing their eyes up to heaven to notice. Every time one East European country voted for another, Marty would sigh elaborately before reminding us that Ireland was still hanging in there in tenth place and it wasn't over yet.

Before long he got to accurately predicting the division of the “Eastern-bloc” vote, implying that Eastern countries were voting for their neighbours because they were neighbours. But there is another way of seeing it: they were voting within a culture which, though derivative of the culture of the West, is inscrutable to most of us on the other side of the melted iron curtain. (For the purposes of this thesis, Finland is an honorary member of said “Eastern-bloc”.)

Think Bill Murray's character in Lost in Translation. A deadpan American actor who regards himself and his life with an irony so light he can barely move, he is bemused to find himself adrift for a weekend in a city where lately-landed Western pop culture is celebrated with an enthusiasm born of recent discovery. It is as though Tokyo has caught a passing glimpse of Western pop culture since the 1950s and recreated it in its most intense and literal form. He feels like he's experiencing a genetically-enhanced version of his own cultural past.

What we missed about “our” opening up of “our” borders to the East was that this would be a two-way process. We thought only of how we could exploit our new arrivals in return for letting them participate in our markets and culture. But something surprising is happening. They have come to, for example, Western pop culture in its penultimate chapter and see in it things we have forgotten or overlooked or so clothed in irony and post-modern bolloxology that we lack all capacity to comprehend that someone else might entirely fail to get the “joke”.

For us, for example, heavy metal is no longer to be taken literally, but represents a raised eyebrow that speaks distantly of our own lost innocence. For our neighbours from the East, however, there is nothing lost about the innocence. They may see, of course, a “joke”, but it is not the same joke we see. It is a joke about rebellion and liberation and letting-go, but such things are for them too serious and too much fun to be treated ironically. Just as our rock 'n' roll culture was about to run out of steam, we find it colonised by a generation of newcomers who bring to it the hopes and demands we brought to it perhaps 40-odd years ago. And ... THEY ARE HERE NOW – among us.

It was interesting to observe the extent to which the huge numbers of eastern Europeans in Ireland dictated the destination of the Irish vote. But what their bloc-voting tells us is nothing like as simple as that they want to help each other win our competitions. What they want is to experience the whole of our history of cultural liberation, right from the beginning, free of our jaded sense of its limits and self-referential knowingness. And this has implications far beyond pop music. These iron maidens from the East are here in our cultures and democracies now, promising to bring their huge resources of energy, enthusiasm, resourcefuness and joy to bear on the way we live. Their strength of numbers has significance beyond the capacity to influence the destination of the Eurovision trophy. They have the desire and the capacity to rewind the spool of Western society since the '60s and play it again in a spirit of adventure, curiosity and expectation. Because we have become so bored with ourselves, our cultures now belong to them.