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    Pop Power

    Posted Tuesday, February 24, 2009 9:56 AM | By Willa Paskin
    Imagine if you took American Idol, added shinier clothes, cheesier production values, slighter pop songs (I know, I know how could it be possible!), and then topped it all off with an oversized helping of nationalism. The result would be the extremely trivial, highly political, tremendously campy annual Eurovision Song Contest, in which musical acts from various European nations, plus the likes of Israel, Turkey, and Russia, slap on headsets and some discarded Backstreet Boys duds and vie for simultaneously meaningful and meaningless cultural bragging rights.

    This year's contest, which will take place in Moscow, goes down in May, but participating nations are in the midst of choosing their representatives now. Israel's selection, an Arab and Israeli duo that were picked the day after the Gaza war began, has already generated some controversy. The Times reported over the weekend that Georgia, on the heels of August's war with Russia, has mischievously selected "We Don't Wanna Put In"—as in Vladimir Putin—as their Eurovision entry. Should the song make it to the finals (voters are allowed to vote for any song but their own country's), it would, theoretically, be broadcast on Russia's state-owned Channel One—where it will be the most critical item to air on Putin in recent memory. Not bad rabble-rousing for a lousy pop song.

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