In December of 2023, Czechia held its National Final at, what the host assured us, was the legendary Roxy Club in Prague. And I feel like the Czech broadcasters must have spent all their money on that location, because they certainly didn’t spend it on the production. Adam Misik, a man I cannot tell apart from an AI bot, hosted the evening. If there were sound people working at the venue, they appeared to be spending half their time doing something else – maybe tending bar? Rebooting Adam Misik?
I give you this context before presenting the video of Pedestal, which won that night.
This performance immediately sent the Eurofan audience into doom and gloom predictions. Aiko, they proclaimed (based on this single performance in a nightclub with awful sound) could not sing, and thus Czechia was doomed not to qualify.
Having watched the same performance, I was very much inclined to disagree, and threw all my votes Aiko’s way. Yes, the vocals were a bit shaky, but they were perfectly competent for a club performance – which this essentially was. And vocals can be learned, especially in the gap between December and May. What Aiko had was far more important – she had both a great fuck-you song and tons of charisma. That scream on stage? OH! The young riot grrl in me let out an audible shriek of delight.
In a world where women often can’t express their anger, seeing an angry woman on stage getting rewarded for being angry by winning a ticket to Eurovision was absolutely joy.
I’m not going to call Pedestal an empowerment song, because empowerment songs usually need to empower someone besides the person singing them. But what Pedestal gives us is even better – a break-up belter. This is the song that people can put on when they’re feeling miserable after a relationship ends, when they just want to smash all the belongings of their ex, and realize that it’s more important to be in love with yourself than to be in love with someone who’s going to treat you poorly. It’s a song of affirmation for people with self-doubt, who feel pressure to stay with a scrub, and remember that you deserve more.
And the studio version convinced me that if Aiko nailed the vocals, this song would go off like a bottle rocket on stage:
Which is why I was so disappointed when Aiko and her team released the Eurovision version of this song. I’ve put a version below that starts about 20 seconds before the major change in the song:
Ooof.
So what we’ve done now is taken a fantastic break up anthem, and put in a completely unnecessary explanatory piece that just stops the momentum of the song and jars us, as listeners, out of its groove. Yes, I understand wanting to set up Aiko for her big jury vocal moments that occur a few seconds later – a change that is welcome and that I hope will make a difference. But adding this very specific fight into the song takes away some of its universality, and makes it less relatable to the listener.
I think it also presents us with a conflicted character on the stage. The Aiko we saw at the Roxy nightclub was a tigress, an Amazon, a fearless woman who had claimed her own agency and wanted us to know about it. The Aiko that’s being presented on the Eurovision stage is someone who’s processing trauma, who’s in the middle of a crisis – and tonally, it’s a mismatch with the rest of the song.
I understand the desire to want to add depth and complexity to a song for the Eurovision stage. I get the reasons why a break was put in to make Aiko’s big vocal moments have more contrast. I want women at Eurovision to be multidimensional and complex as possible in the three minutes that they are on stage. But halting the song in the middle with a traumatic flashback to the situation that Aiko has so wonderfully given the metaphorical middle finger to in the first two minutes of the song is NOT IT.
I hope there’s time to rejig some of this before the Eurovision staging, because in the end, it won’t be Aiko’s vocals or performance that are a problem, but a gimmick that muddles the message of what is otherwise a powerful pop song. It breaks my heart.
dudepoints.fun 