There's no thread for the only music event to be among the top sport events. With only the FIFA World Cup/Olympics/UEFA Euro/UEFA CL final beating it in eyeballs, it's the Eurovision Song Contest. This year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It's spread over 2 semi final
Roman/Greek orthodox priests and believers in Cyprus were protesting against the Cyprus entry, demanding unsuccessfully that it be withdrawn as a devil's worship song. The song is called "El Diablo", but has nothing to do with devil worship, but all about a woman in an abusive relationship.
This in a way ignited interest in the States for the Eurovision Song Contest. There are now several American fans having youtube channels about the ESC.
The number of views of all the youtube videos with/about the ESC2021 is mind blowing. Just Malta alone already has almost 9 million, and that's only the official ESC channel.
its widely recognized in all of Europe especially in 2015. Il Volo got the highest televotes in the history of the competition yet the judges slammed them.
Sorry, my friend. There's not for nothing a two-tier voting. One from professionals in the music and one from the public. One time the balance tips this way, sometimes the other way. You can't accept a result only if it fits your opinion. That's trvmpism. If I lose, it's fraud.
I first encountered Eurovision while in Sweden for the summer of 1987. Naturally the people I was with watched; I even bought the 45 of the winning song, "Hold Me Now" by Ireland's Johnny Logan. I've paid some attention ever since. When I first designed an online course about the contemporary Muslim world about ten years ago, I borrowed the phrase "And now for something completely different" from Monty Python and added something I figured would surprise people to each of the fifteen units. One of those was spotlighting Azerbaijan at the Eurovision contest, with unexpected music and videos coming from a Muslim country.
Everybody on social media, who suggested the Italian band member did a "line" should apologize to him. The drug test turned out to be negative.