Friday, March 02, 2007

Losing Before the Competition Begins

I posted the lyrics already and...

Eurovision may ban Israeli entry due to lyrics on nuclear war

Eurovision Song Contest organizers said Thursday they might ban this year's Israeli entry, Teapacks' Push the Button, because of what they termed its inappropriate political message.

The song, to be performed at the contest in Helsinki in May, overwhelmingly won Israel's competition Wednesday.

It is sung in English, French and Hebrew and seemingly refers indirectly to Iran's nuclear ambitions and its hard-line leader, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"It's absolutely clear that this kind of message is not appropriate for the competition," said Kjell Ekholm, an organizer of the contest. "We'll have all the delegation leaders here in Helsinki next week, and I'm sure we'll talk about this case within the EBU [European Broadcasting Union] group."

The song warns about the dangers of nuclear war, and the lyrics of the song refer to demonic and crazy rulers, and say that he's gonna blow us up to ... kingdom come.


There go the Europeans - hiding their heads in the sand.

You can sing about girls, about boys, about gays, about boys & girls, about the spring, the summer, the winter.

You can strum a guitar or a violin.

You can dance and sing, sing and dance or just prance.

You can pretend to be Ghenghis Khan or monsters.

But you can't sing about crazy rulers who might press an atomic attack button.

2 comments:

Suzanne Pomeranz said...

Except that there have been political messages in the lyrics many times over the past 50 years of Eurovision - mostly in the past 15 or so... Some even directed (and not so subtly) at Israel.

And we all know why they want to ban this one, and not only because Israel is singing it!

YMedad said...

I think so too but didn't have enough time to search back all through the lyrics and years.