Okay, this is going to be a long post, but I need you to stick with me here
Back in December, Albania held Festival i Kenges, its annual music competition through which it chooses an entry to go to Eurovision. The Festival was won by Mal Retkoceri, who came with the biggest arms I’ve ever seen and a song called Çmendur. However, the artist chosen to go to Eurovision was a woman named Besa, who brought the song Zemrën N’dorë to the festival:
And I liked her song. It had all the elements I expected from Albania: a very cosmetically polished singer with a very big voice, a song that had plenty of dramatic moments to showcase the aformentioned big voice, and the Albanian language. In this particular performance, the dramatic moments in the music were also supplemented by the dramatic tension provided by the most ill-fitting costume in National Final history.
No wonder the camera crew spent so much of the song focused on these heroes:
I did, however, laugh at the cover art for the song, which made it look like a sexy warning for dads to put plastic bags out of the reach of children.
BESA GOT INTO THE PAINT COVERS AGAIN PLEASE SOMEONE RESCUE HER.
However, all of my mildly pleasant feelings toward the song wholly evaporated once the revamp was released:
I know that this is supposed to be the same song, but it’s not. It’s taken the rough melodic structure from Zemrën N’dorë but turned it into something completely new. It’s like saying that Never Gonna Give You Up is the same song as Yung Gravy’s Betty (Get Money) because they use the same musical phrase.
Let’s go through how Titan and Zemrën N’dorë are different:
- Titan is in English – Look, I don’t want to begrudge any country from shaking it up. Just because Albania has traditionally sent songs in Albanian, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to send a song in English. The only problem is that now that they’ve send a song in English, I can understand the lyrics, and they are…not great! There’s nothing wrong with them, but it’s just that they’re rather banal, and don’t seem connected to anything in Besa’s performance – although I will give the songwriters credit for the line ‘every tear’s gonna richochet’. Leave it to Besa, the woman who turns a plastic bag into a deadly item, to weaponize a tear.
- Titan’s English isn’t Zemrën N’dorë’s English – The song that Besa performed on the stage in Albania – the one that she seemed to be pouring her heart into? It wasn’t about being a Titan in disguise. No – it was a passionate love song that, compared to Titan, was Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets. Why Besa and her team wanted to trade in evocative imagery like “you strangled me to your heart” and “like sugar in the bloodstream, you poisoned me in my veins,” for survive/alive and unbreakable/unshakeable rhymes, I’ll never know.
- Besa’s English singing voice – Is Besa doing a blaccent? For parts of the song, maybe. Now, some might argue that having a lyrics like “Even if I fall, I’m gon’ get up” is just fitting the English in the metre of the song, but to me, that seems like a deliberate lyrical choice rather than just making it “I’m gonna get up.” There could be an artistic justification for this, but I’d like to hear why, because it’s just jarring otherwise.
- THOSE BANJOS – Oh my god. Did someone think, “Hey, Beyonce’s country album is coming out soon, so maybe we better yeehaw this up?” Because if so, they’ve done an awful job of it. I’m used to Albanian songs layering on the electric guitar, but here, they’ve just added gratuitous banjo – emphasis on the grate.
I love Eurovision as a competition, and I want to actively root for as many songs as possible, but when I see an act that makes inexplicable choices to turn a good song into a not good song, it bothers me. Albania had what was a qualifier, and now they’ve got a song that’s lost any semblance of originality linking it to its country. It will get lost in the mix of female-fronted up tempo songs – even more so because it likely won’t have a dynamite staging to stand out from the pack. Perhaps Albania should have sent the man with the giant arms, as at least he’d be memorable.
dudepoints.fun 