The sight of a piece whose authors include an erstwhile ALPS colleague on the use of music in teaching politics neatly coincides with the past week’s European extravaganza of music/politics: Eurovision.
I’ll assume that a good number of you know about this, but for the culturally-void here’s a quick run-down.
Each member of the European Broadcast Union gets to submit a song for a competition, where everyone gets to vote, but not for their country. Someone wins.
Obviously, there’s more to it than that.
‘Each member’ obviously doesn’t mean each member does submit, or is allowed to submit. And Australia (very much neither an EBU member nor in (or near) Europe) get to submit for, well, reasons.
And the whole voting thing is quite involved. and occasionally corrupt. Pardon, ‘irregular‘.
Throw in a revolution-triggering song, landmarks on clipboards and opening of borders and you see why it’s catnip to the passing academic.
A quick squizz on Google Scholar throws up thousands of results, from imagery to regional voting blocks, LGBT+ identities to governance. This year you’ve also had a Zelensky dimension too.
Someone’s even made a lovely dataset of voting for you to play with. To help with things like analysis of the popular v. jury voting.
Throw in the wildly varying conceptions of what might constitute a popular song and if you struggle to make a class out of some aspect of this, then you are really not trying.
And since you didn’t ask, here’s my personal favourite of recent years: