{"id":831,"date":"2011-05-15T15:41:34","date_gmt":"2011-05-15T14:41:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=831"},"modified":"2011-05-15T15:41:34","modified_gmt":"2011-05-15T14:41:34","slug":"eurovision-the-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=831","title":{"rendered":"Eurovision: the winner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, that was one I didn’t see coming. \u00a0The 2011 contest winner is an 80s-style duet from Azerbaijan – admittedly one with a decent chorus. \u00a0I wouldn’t have picked this as a standout, but I suppose it didn’t have much competition in its genre, which is always a help.<\/p>\n

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The contest actually credits the act as “Ell & Nikki”, but their names are Eldar Gasimov and Nigar Jamal. \u00a0Ms Jamal is an ex-pat living in London. \u00a0Azerbaijan only started entering in 2008, but they’ve made the top 10 every year since, so perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised by this.<\/p>\n

Countries like Azerbaijan take winning the Eurovision seriously, and not without good reason. \u00a0They’re well aware that the rest of Europe doesn’t pay them much attention, couldn’t place them on a map, and vaguely suspects they’d be a poor choice of holiday destination. \u00a0But as winners of Eurovision 2011, they get to host the 2012 show. \u00a0That’s great publicity. \u00a0(For an illustration of this attitude, see the excellent documentary Sounds Like Teen Spirit<\/em> about the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, and the segments about the girl from Georgia. \u00a0It’s on Netflix.)<\/p>\n

Technically, they’ll put on a perfectly decent show. \u00a0The real question is whether they’ll screw it up with bad publicity from their human rights record. \u00a0This is, after all, a country where people are still jailed for mocking the President. \u00a0There is certainly a risk that they won’t get on well with the travelling retinue of Eurovision fans. \u00a0Of course, there’s also the possibility that a bit of international attention will encourage the authorities to get their act together; they’ll certainly have to relax their visa rules, which would currently prevent the Armenian entry from showing up at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, that was one I didn’t see coming. \u00a0The 2011 contest winner is an 80s-style duet from Azerbaijan – admittedly one with a decent chorus. \u00a0I wouldn’t have picked this as a standout, but I suppose it didn’t have much competition in its genre, which is always a help. The contest actually credits the act […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":832,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions\/832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}