Eurovision chooses Swedish entry "Euphoria" by Loreen as winner of 2012 contest
by Aaron Zorgel
May 28, 2012
On Saturday, the 57th annual Eurovision song competition wrapped up in Azerbaijan, seeing 26 nations go head-to-head in a battle of song. Swedish entrant Loreen destroyed the competition, scoring 372 points, edging out the closest competition by a margin of over 112 points.
On Saturday, the 57th annual Eurovision song competition wrapped up in Azerbaijan, seeing 26 nations go head-to-head in a battle of song.
Swedish entrant Loreen destroyed the competition, scoring 372 points, edging out the closest competition by a margin of over 112 points. The winning song is called “Euphoria,” an uptempo Euro-dance (for lack of a better genre descriptor) track:
The runner-up was Buranovskiye Babushki, a group of six Russian grandmothers that we wrote about early on in the competition. Their entry “Party For Everybody” was adorably strange, and featured (for some reason) choreographed baking:
If these two entries are the top of the heap, just how bad is the bottom of the barrel?
Renowned English crooner Englebert Humperdinck was responsible for the United Kingdom’s acoustic ballad “Love Will Set You Free,” which racked up a whopping 25 points, finishing second last:
The lowest-scoring entry of the competition (12 points) was Norwegian dance-pop singer Tooji, with the song “Stay”:
The results are perplexing, since I see little difference in quality between an entry scoring 372 points and one scoring just 12. It turns out that the voting procedure is every bit as strange and foreign to me as the entries themselves.
Tags: Music, Engelbert Humperdinck, Eurovision