Thank you.
Estboy!
The ESC has become a little bit too much political, at least in the far far east. The contribution of Georgia
Stephane & 3G "We Don't Wanna Put In" has been found not to comply with the ESC rules (no lyrics, speeches, gestures of political nature are allowed) and decided that the lyrics have to be changed within a week, but the Georgians stated that they won't change, but withdraw from the contest.
Meanwhile there is more information about the Ukrainian disqualification of Anastasiya Prihod'ko and her song in Russian language. The national organizer changed the rules that it's not allowed to sing in Russian language, which is quite strange, because almost 20 % of Ukraine are ethnic Russians and about 75 % of the Ukrainians can speak the Russian language. Furthermore her song is already on CD, which is really funny because her debut CD is not yet released, just printed. In her case it's quite obvious that the 'fight' of the 'Orange parties' against the Russian language is the clear political reason. The participant in the ESC 2009 will be the ex-(3 month)-VIA Gra girl Svitlana Loboda with
Be My Valentine. Noisy, if you ask me.
The Russian Channel One hurried up with telling that Prihod'ko's participation at the Russian competition became possible because of producer Konstantin Meladze's insistent fight for his artist, which in fact is so not true. The producer didn't even have a song for her, because he couldn't use the one from the Ukrainian qualification. Just a few days ago he composed the new song, wrote the lyrics together with an Estonian lady (usually he never does such things, but in bad times the devil eats flies) and recorded without having all the musicians he needed. Even the back singers he couldn't get in time, so Prihod'ko had to record the back vocals too (which wouldn't be allowed in the international competition, because all vocals have to be live). Two days before the competition the song was ready and Prihod'ko was put on the list. Of course there was no time for proper arrangements, no time for thinking about costumes, choreography or other performance details. The unusually low sound quality of the record and the quite weak performance (compared to usual performances of the artist) is therefore quite understandable. During the waiting for the results she was not only uncooperative towards interviewers, she looked obviously exhausted. After the contest they immediately bagged her and dragged her off. Nastya is 'ill'.
The whole case heavily smells politics. If we listen to Meladze's words - an Ukrainian singer sings the Russian entry partly in Russian and Ukrainian with a Georgian composer (Meladze) and an Estonian lyrics co-writer (Gol'de) - we can assume that Russia wanted to repair a bit what has been damaged politically the last months. They need the votes of their neighbours. Russia as organizer should finish with a good result of course.
Iosif Prigozhin, the producer and husband of Valeriya, speaks openly about manipulation and fraud. He had prepared everything very well and invested much money into the competition , in which Valeriya should not have real opponents and could use the ESC for pushing her international career. Now she has been defeated by a totally unprepared career starter with a hurriedly assembled song in not even demo quality, what a humiliation! But honestly, who can believe that the tele votings were really not manipulated?