The Rise (or Fall) of A-Pop, Pt. 4

Part 4: National anthems and the worldvision of tomorrow

All installments Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4

Last One Laughing is a shoestring-budget reality format on Amazon that has now been a huge hit in a dozen different countries. It’s an easy international template: the simple concept, based on the original Japanese show Documental, is to get ten comedians in a room and see who can go the longest without laughing.

I’ve now watched several iterations of this show and frequently find it excruciatingly unfunny. But I’m always transfixed. I enjoy being on the outside of so many of the jokes, like an invisible, humorless anthropologist. Each version of the show, according to Amazon, is a huge hit in its originating country, but has very little audience crossover from other countries, unless there is a large expat population watching abroad. As Calum Marsh put it in the New York Times: “It is specific, highly localized content, entirely by design.”

This phenomenon of feeling like an outsider to specific, highly localized content persisted for me even in versions of the show that featured comedians I already know who speak English. It just turns out there is always a certain insider element to what makes everyone in the room laugh. There are some ways in which comedy can make a play for universalism like music so often does: a fart noise is a fart noise across cultures. But lots of comedy in LOL—full of local references and inside jokes—doesn’t travel as well.¹ Watching the show as an American (the US doesn’t have a version yet) is a shortcut to a mindset of a nationally comparative existence, often making me feel adrift while still sparking my interest.

For a long time, this sort of distanced comparative appreciation is exactly how I’ve felt about the yearly Eurovision Song Contest. My purely intellectual curiosity and stubborn critical ambivalence has long been a mark against my otherwise global cosmopolitan pro-pop orientation. I’ve always seen Eurovision as a collection of wan imitations of pop styles overcompensating with visual spectacle to paper over the thinness of the music, which, I am always quick to insist, is what I’m in the market for. I don’t think this assessment is totally wrong, but I do think my instinctive refusal to immerse myself in it as the shared experience it’s intended to be has been an overreaction.

Eurovision has been in my periphery for at least twenty years. I remember starting to notice it in college when I engaged more with British pop criticism and got more into bubblegum music and ABBA. Through the ‘10s, the Singles Jukebox had a Eurovision livestream each year that I followed but never participated in, finally listening to some finalist entries in earnest by the end of the decade (which meant that I could glory in both the sound and satisfying neologism of KEiiNO’s joik break). Then, starting in the ‘20s, my kids picked up on Eurovision from a few of their friends’ families who watched every year. We watched the highlights, and eventually the full show, after it started broadcasting live on NBC’s streaming platform Peacock in 2021.

I am still an outsider and dilettante when it comes to Eurovision. I only started paying closer attention to it a few years ago, mostly to bond with my kids.² What I bring to the discussion, I think, is an insistence on listening to Eurovision in the context of my quixotic weekly project of streaming-era dumpster-diving. Very few Eurovision songs withstand my merciless listening process. They suffer from their contextual theatricality, which rarely pings the baser brain-itch I’m seeking from sound alone. Even very popular Eurovision songs just don’t compete very well against what seems like the “real world” of global pop music in various degrees of ferment. Though there are always exceptions in a given competition, Eurovision songs generally suffer from both a cryptic insularity (a “had to be there” feeling) and also an averaged-out blandness of popcraft.

To some extent, it’s the social experiment of Eurovision that draws me in; I once again assume the role of humorless anthropologist. I like its promise of international cultures retaining unique regional characteristics while still presenting a unified ideal of shared humanity that necessitates softer boundaries. It is an example of a “stew” being a more apt metaphor for multicultural shared purpose than a “melting pot,” the framework I learned in grade school that the US has always struggled to live up to. (It turns out you can’t actually melt everything together, especially if it’s all supposed to turn white instead of brown.)

The coherence of any “vision” of Eurovision is helped by the stronger literal borders between contestants, every country given its special place in the Voltron of world harmony. The contingent detente of uniting across borders for one big celebration sometimes hits geopolitical dissonance, as it did this year with Israel’s continued fraught involvement and near win. In a skit, the Swiss hosts sang lyrics that sounded (charitably) like a miscalculated attempt at irony about the situation: “Non-political, strictly neutral, doesn’t matter if you’re good or brutal.” But I’m still sympathetic to the general idea of the project, however unbearably hypocritical the actual event itself might get: lots of shared references amassing into a cross-cultural dialect, a sort of pop music Esperanto.

The Eurovision template doesn’t really work in America. The major US culture industries are too used to being a one-way conveyor belt of global entertainment to accept meaningfully regionalized or, god forbid, second-fiddle status. I could, however, imagine American subcultures and sidestreams that would succeed as junior partners to a bigger property: the Dropout network of L.A. improv cult celebrities would do a mean Last One Laughing, and I think you get something like the spirit of Eurovision in Drag Race, which itself has become an international franchise. Part of this probably has to do with the country’s literal bigness along with its figurative bigness. But translating productive competition into American geography doesn’t seem to really work, either.³

The one attempt at importing the Eurovision format to America as an interstate competition, the American Song Contest on NBC in 2022, was a ratings and creative flop. I don’t want to undersell how bad it was simply as television, any more than I want to discount that Last One Laughing might be unfunny for more mundane reasons than being culturally alienating. But I do think that you simply don’t have the same character of a legible regional parade among states in the US that you do between countries participating in Eurovision.⁴

Or rather, the regional character of our states doesn’t translate to the sort of quasi-universalist principles of Eurovision, where national character can sometimes serve as a costume adorning music that could have been sung by any other contestant—a novelty song, a lugubrious ballad, a dance banger.⁵ There is one particularly revealing example of a recent American national “costume” of this sort on an international stage, captured in a viral video of the 2024 Mr. World competition, with the US showing up in a shoddy-looking Captain America suit. (Another funny A-pop wrinkle: the actual winner of that competition was the contestant representing Puerto Rico.)

The American Song Contest wound up with a strange mix of seasoned professionals repping their states with varying degrees of meaningfulness (everyone knows Jewel is from Alaska, but who knew Michael Bolton was from Connecticut?); unknowns singing nondescript pop that could have come from anywhere or nowhere; or, most provocatively, artists like Las Marías from Arizona or eventual winner AleXa (pictured above) from Oklahoma using internationally recognized global music forms—Mexican regional music and K-pop, respectively—to signify the multicultural promise of immigrant experiences and heritage in the US, while also sidestepping the limitations of so many other contestants’ warmed-over, generic A-pop.⁶

There is a difference between annoying facsimiles of American pop coming from America itself and the annoying facsimiles of Americanized pop you’ll find in Eurovision, and I think the difference boils down to the project. In America, pop has always been the project unto itself, whereas in Eurovision, Eurovision is the project, and it’s OK for pop music to occasionally be the byproduct, even if some genuinely good music by new or established artists does also feature. American pop rarely gets treated as a byproduct. It’s why the few places you can find interesting, unrepentant byproduct-pop in the US—movie and TV soundtracks, stars slumming it in commercials, strange transmissions from the influencer content mines—capture my attention despite often being strange or terrible: it’s similar to how even the bad Eurovision entries are part of the fun.

Maybe I’m being naive about it, but I think Eurovision still has value as a project of geopolitical significance, even in a corny “now more than ever” sort of way, which is why it’s painful to see the contest roiled by the realities it tries to shoo out of the limelight. By contrast, I’ve argued in this series that America’s grand, centralizing global pop project is for the most part over. I’m inclined to believe that this transition is an inevitable structural element of transnational communication—specifically, of the multidirectional potential of the global streaming era—and that the rise of A-pop or decline of American centrality in pop music is most useful as a way to think about what’s going on everywhere else. (That’s where most of the music is, and so that’s where my attention is.)⁷

What I wonder about lately is if Eurovision might ultimately benefit from the increasing collective power of the rest of the world’s pop music—if it might start to become the sort of project that drives global music more in a way that American music has done for so long. Could a musical federation of nations fill a vacuum that the US is leaving? And if so, would the countries participating in Eurovision even be the most likely candidates to try? There have always been global breakthroughs who got their first big moment in Eurovision—ABBA is the archetypal example of global impact—but multiple global scenes developing simultaneously, with Eurovision as an engine for broadcasting them, might be new.

But things can change. For the last few years, I’ve been following not only the main competition, but also the country-based finals, where I find much more promising music qua music. This year I rooted for Polish pop-phonk and bounce-inflected Spanish melodrama, among others, which sounded as fresh as anything I’ve heard anywhere in the world this year, and couldn’t have come from anywhere else. (Both were runners-up to lesser but still worthy entries.) Last year, two competitors who seemed clued in to a forward-thinking zeitgeist made it through to the competition—Angelina Mango in Italy and Marina Satti in Greece—and I think Go_A’s “Shum” fell into this category in 2021.⁸

In these examples, the competition becomes something like an incubator for emerging styles with mass appeal. This is different, and more interesting to me personally, from the most common perceptions of Eurovision that I tend to come across, which cast the event as a funhouse of timeless novelties or a kitschy wax museum of styles past their prime. But it would make sense for the competition to adapt productively in an environment where there is no presumed central power to mimic, and there is no expectation that a pale imitation of past versions of global pop success will get you anywhere. You’re better off being an oddball original.

To be clear, I think these shifts are still mostly subterranean for the time being, and I don’t know that the contest in its current form can bear the weight of its own limitations and contradictions. Even absent the past several years’ controversies, there is a certain cynical gamesmanship baked in to this version of the contest, with too many acts forced into a stark binary between mercenary novelty and po-faced sincerity that stifles the sort of boundary-muddling that can produce greatness in pop—novel sincerity and sincere novelty. But if some laboratory-designed transnational pop star crucible like that did exist in the current era, it might look a bit like a Worldvision. I have my doubts that the US would be very competitive in such a competition, if they even deigned to accept their golden ticket. We’d at least need to think up a better costume.

1. The British Last One Laughing requires a bit of an asterisk in this discussion: it’s very funny, but I’ve also thought of British comedy scenes as comparative to US comedy for as long as I can remember. I think the British LOL is also designed with a bit less of a regional audience in mind, along with just being better produced. The UK has a certain imperial attitude toward its comedy and a high bar for its minimum viable television product.

2. I think the appeal for them was not dissimilar to the appeal of a kid-oriented repackaging outfit like Kidz Bop: as the median pop song in the American charts has gotten more profane, Eurovision is a bastion of relatively clean-cut pop silliness, with sexual innuendo and minor swears adding a manageable frisson of taboo, the sort of thing that gives kids power rather than merely confusing or potentially traumatizing them.

3. I should pause for a footnote to address American Idol, which to me is an exception that proves the rule: though individual Americana backstories were always a staple of the show, the promise of AmIdol was always to launch the sort of American idol who would become famous in the global way that American pop demands—not representing America to the world, but becoming the world. It’s amusing to me that a disaggregated “American Idol sound” has become a distinctive feature of how American pop currently dominates global charts, through new stars who decided the literal Idol experience wasn’t worth it (AmIdol dropout Benson Boone) or who found a launching pad by avoiding broadcast television’s pathetic twilight (Teddy Swims or Alex Warren from YouTube/TikTok).

4. You might find something like this quality when you include territories—Puerto Rico, Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa participated in ASC—but this also underlines the myopia of the concept. Why not open it up to more of the world, or eat some crow and get our asses kicked in the actual Eurovision?

5. In fact, songs that do not do this can do pretty well, but there’s a curious alchemy to how much national character is “enough” and how much is “too much.”

6. Ironically, warmed-over A-pop can be distinctively Eurovision-y while also being an incredibly weak way for Americans to signify in their own competition. I’m thinking of the Georgia contestant, who did a TikTok-geared novelty rap song that sounded like a Max Martin intern whipping up generic West Coast hip-hop production—which was very Eurovision, but also very not Georgia. (For what it’s worth, longtime Cheiron songwriter for hire Andreas Carlsson co-wrote a lot of the songs for ASC, but not that one.)

7. I do worry sometimes that America’s uneasy current role in the global pop environment might mirror its geopolitical decline—lots of foundations crumbling without obvious international alternatives taking their place. It worries me much more in the realm of film and television, though, which seems to be in a more profound crisis right now than music is.

8. Angelina Mango’s move, which I’ve described before as absorbing reggaeton and Latin pop while keeping Italy’s perennially waggling eyebrows, seems to have some traction in broader Italian pop at the moment. Marina Satti, who offered a distinctively Greek sound with Latin and Arabic pop elements, has so far turned out to be lightning in a bottle, a genuinely exciting and totally unique global pop star in the making.