In recent years, Serbia’s PZE has been one of my most anticipated National Finals in Eurovision, with acts like Konstrakta, who is bringing museum-quality performance art to a pop audience, Luke Black, who channels gen-Z experience of being too online, and Filip Balos, who produces exquisite pop beats. His Novi Plan Drugi San is still a fixture of many Eurofan playlists, even though it lost to Luke Black in 2023.
In fact, Novi Plan Drugi San is so beloved that I was sure that it had come second to Luke Black, but when I went back and looked at the results, it turned out that second place had actually gone to the singer Princ, with his hybrid Balkan ballad/dance pop song Cvet sa Istoka.
At the time, I thought Princ got his name because he was doing some sort of elaborate “Princ of Persia” cosplay:
But it turns out that his stage name is actually ‘Princ od Vranje’ or Prince of Vranje, the town where he was born. Princ’s real name is Stefan Zdravković, and he won this year’s Serbian National Final with the Balkan ballad Mila:
But while the sound is definitely a traditional Balkan ballad, the lyrics and the look are not. The opening verse is:
To me, that reads like a song that belongs in the middle of a video game – something sung by a bard as the protagonist rests in a tavern before going out to slay another monster.
And the imagery of the National Final, with the roses and the crescent moon, seems to reference animation like Beauty and the Beast and the Dreamworks logo.
Which leads me to ask – is Princ our first cosplay contestant?
If so, it might explain why I don’t find his songs or performances as compelling as his Serbian colleagues referenced above. While they are using their songs to express their views, Princ is performing songs written by others.* He’s channeling their words and borrowing visual signifiers that are designed to remind us of something else. In doing so, Princ may be hoping to create the same emotional response that we had with the original artwork, but what we get instead is a facsimile of that experience. No matter how good the cosplay may be, it’s still not the real thing.
*I know I talk a lot about authenticity, but I think an artist can still bring authenticity to a song without having to have written it – see Nina Zizic’s performance of Dobridosli for an example of this.
dudepoints.fun 