Breaking the Silence

22 May 2006 14:14 Renée germany, pop culture

I know it’s been a long time since I last updated, but honestly I just haven’t had a lot to say about my life in Germany lately.

Even so, I did do a very European thing the other night: For the first time in the four years that I have lived here, on Saturday night A. and I watched the Eurovision Song Contest.

From what I understand, the Eurovision Song Contest is about as important around here as the World Cup. (For my American readers out there, the World Cup is this big soccer tournament that is held every four years and is just as important to the rest of the world as the Super Bowl is to Americans.)

Though A. had seen the Eurovision Song Contest numerous times as a kid, we had never bothered to watch it since coming to Germany because we don’t listen to the kind of music it is usually associated with: Catchy pop songs, big ballads, and folk music.

However, this year was different: This year rock came to Eurovision from Finland in the form of a “horror rock” group who dress in monster costumes and call themselves Lordi… Now that is the kind of music that A. and I listen to!

As with any shock rock group, Lordi stirred up controversy in Athens even before they went on stage and of course, this made A. and I all the more eager to see them perform. The “controversy” is nothing that any fan of Alice Cooper, Kiss, or Marilyn Manson hasn’t heard before: They are Satanists; they are corrupting family values, etc., etc.

Lordi was scheduled to perform seventeenth out of twenty four entries, so A. and I had to sit through 16 mostly whiney songs and then had to wait as the German commentator warned parents to shield their children’s eyes for the three minutes that the monster rockers performed. (Interestingly enough there were no warnings given when scantily-clad women from various countries performed. Oh yeah, that’s right, we’re in Europe, not America: Sex is OK here, violence is not.)

“Hardrock Halleluiah” was the song and as a hard rock/heavy metal fan I think I can say it wasn’t too bad. In my opinion it was far from the death and/or speed metal that I was all too familiar with in my youth and frankly I wasn’t even close to shocked. I rather enjoyed the performance and though I was rooting for them, I really didn’t give them much of a chance to place very highly, let alone win.

Yet win they did and it pleased me to think that in this pop-and-hiphop-infested world that maybe real rock and roll isn’t dead after all.

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