Last Saturday the Eurovision Song Contest was blessed by the iconic performance of Madonna, accompanied by Grammy-nominated rapper Quavo. Many self-proclaimed musical experts turned to Twitter to bash the ‘horrible’ and ‘disgusting’ artistic display during their dear and beloved Song Contest. However, this performance was nothing but a beautiful political statement.
First of all, let’s agree that this year’s Eurovision was already a mess before Madonna joined the circus. It was hosted in one of the most controversial countries, had some weird-ass acts, and highly politized motivations for the awarding of points.
Woke queen
But let’s talk about Madonna. I hope everyone understands that Madonna (besides the contestants of Iceland of course) was the only woke person at the Eurovision Song Contest.
While Madonna made a clear statement in favor of a peaceful end to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the rest of the world just played in this Israeli puppet show as if there wasn’t a raging war going on 50 miles outside of the venue. No country did what would have been right: boycotted the event. Instead – like always in history – they choose self-interest over the common good.
Subliminal messages
After a more than iconic performance of the 30th anniversary of her legendary song Like A Prayer, the queen of pop opened her second song with the following introduction:
“They’re so naïve, they think we’re not aware of their crimes.” Most probably referring to Israel and their continuing war crimes upon oppressed Palestine. What was more notable were her dancers wearing gas-masks. Referring to the earlier teargas attacks fired at Palestine on May 15th. During this attack, at least 65 Palestinians were wounded.
She then says: “We know, but we’re just not ready to act.” Meaning that the world damn well knows what Israel is doing, but they’re not ready to act now as they are currently focused on winning the Eurovision Song Contest… How disappointing.
Looking away
The beginning lines of her second song expose the truth about all the participating European countries in this song contest: “You ain’t woke, come get woken”. And this is very true. The world is not woke. We all know what’s going on in Israel, but yet we choose to ignore it.
A few of her dancers wore jackets with the Palestinean flag. The others wore a jacket with the Israeli flag. At the end of her performance, the ‘two countries’ walked hand-in-hand towards a ‘new future’. Beautiful. Shortly after, the words ‘wake up’ showed on the screen, a clear message to the world. We got to wake up and act.
This was a good performance and those saying differently probably do so because they disliked the political message. We all know Eurovision is one big mess with weird acts, overly dramatized acting, obnoxious lights, and corny presenter jokes. This American act was everything Eurovision needed. This performance was of Grammy standards and will go down in history as one of the most notable live-performances. But sadly, Eurovision wasn’t ready for it.
