OSDev.org

beyond infinity wrote: ... (besides I don't own one, so what the heck)

bubach wrote: I don't mind hard rock or their looks, but the lyrics: "Hard Rock Hallelujah..." ? Yuck...

They just want to play

The Grand Prix victory by Lordi sends shockwaves through Europe's music scenery. Have the Europeans gone collectively mad? Don't they like the ballad lard anymore? The Finish monsters have proven: Hard Rock has reached mainstream for good.

There it was again, the ugly grimace of Heavy Metal. And it shocked the most shockingly. Lordi, the Finish rockers in the funny haunted-house costumes, had not even played a note at the Eurovision Song Contest, when already waves of outrage rolled through Europe. Grand Prix fossil Nicole ranted in a German yellow-press newspaper about "nauseating horror masks", culture pessimists got into a flap, and in Greece conservative groups threatened to sue the organizers of the Grand Prix should they not forbid Lordi to take stage. The Finns, so they argued, "cultivate satanism".

That leaves the question whether one could cultivate satanism, and if yes, what real satanist would really step onto the same stage as singing meringues from Norway, disco-pop nudists from Ukraine or folklore groups from the Balkans.

The biggest surprise of the evening was, however, that a full thirty years after the first appearances of Kiss and Alice Cooper a rock band could trigger such an outrage, just because they take stage in horror outfits and then - well, did what? Nothing. Lordi didn't bite off some small animal's head, didn't stake baby dolls, and didn't even try verbally to give themselves the touch of weekend satanists, let alone real ones.

In an interview, singer Tim Putaansuu aka "Lordi" called the repeated reproaches of satanism "complete bull". Who ever bothered to look at the internet homepage of the band couldn't help but believe the man. Not only because the band has recorded a song "Devil is a Loser".

[...]

The complete outfit - some might call it "whole art", more prosaic minds "corporate identity" - cries: Irony! This gets even clearer if you judge Lordi against the background of their music genre: Within the musical brutality of Heavy Metal, especially the Finnish brand, Lordi is to be placed on the shallow-melodious border. On the other end there are bands that are about as far away from the Grand Prix winners as the Croatian folk-dance cheerleader Severina. "For many young metal fans in Finnland we're actually pop", complained Lordi singer Putaansuu in an interview with "Laut.de".

Any insider recognizes at first glance that the appearance of the masked is to be understood as tongue-in-cheek hommage to aged shockrockers like Alice Cooper, Kiss and Wasp - muscally as pictorially. But for 30 years, Heavy Metal has got a problem: The civil criticism considers it and its actors to be simply too stupid for irony. That's why it always falls for rather simply disguised provocations by musicians like Slipknot, Marilyn Manson or - especially in Germany - Rammstein.

At this point, one almost doesn't want to repeat that Heavy Metal is an umbrella term for a genre that unites countless extremly different currents, knows virtuosic musicians and thematic depths that are alien to most other areas of popular music.

Facing the martialic show of bands like Lordi, the hysterics like to forget one thing: they only want to play. And that, Lordi does surprisingly well. You don't have to be a friend of simply-woven, straightforward hardrock to realize that the Finns have mastered their genre perfectly, and in Athens, delivered a highly professional stage show. That is much more than could be said for many contestants this year, even with one eye closed.

Still, prior to the Lordi appearance, the German Grand Prix commentator didn't stop himself from recommending children and sensitive minds to close their eyes or switch off the television. You had to watch primarily folk song contests the last few years to believe you could scare the TV kids of today with five rubber masks.

Not that the Grand Prix this year wasn't something to be scared of. You just have to think of the 70'ies disco gig of Sibel T?z?n, the peroxide blonde Cher decal from Turkey. Or the appearance of LT United from Lithuania, who in their stadium redneck song declared themselves to be "the winners of Eurovision" [...]

On the other side, you have to be thankful for these song artists - for showing us who really is the undead. And for giving the European audience a chance to show maturity. If anything could have left you speechless in this Grand Prix, it was the power of judgement of the audience. They understood the Lordi appearance as what it was: First class entertainment, nothing less, but also nothing more. Sometimes, the people are better educated than many feature writers.

bubach wrote:why would it be translated to german first?

btw: why is everything being said on english _and_ french?

Solar wrote: "I think those eastern countries block-voting is somehow showing which countries in Europe are 'mature', and which are still in the 'toddler' stage..."