Who We Are by Jessika feat. Jennifer Brening
The Sammarinese selection for 2018 felt overly complicated from the start. With little time on my hands this year I avoided most of it, but even from a distance you could sense all was not right. An online vote; several subsequent internal artist selections; a host of songs written by one of the judges, former Austrian entry Zoe; an aborted link to voting via PayPal; and a confusing link to crowdfunding did nothing to avoid questions about the transparency of this year’s process. Something didn’t feel quite right when several of the acts received a 12-point advantage based on the amount of money online ‘investors’ had pledged to the company seemingly owned by Zoe’s dad, (that’s the father of the writer of several of the competing songs, are you following all of this?).
The result? Well, if you can’t win in your own country try for somewhere with a murkier set up. Jessika (mononymic here, but Jessika Muskat to many of us who’ve followed the Maltese selection for many years) is finally going to Eurovision, accompanied in a late artist switch for ‘creative’ reasons by one of her competitive rivals Jennifer Brenning, who lost on her own right but was brought in to this at the last minute. She just happens to be signed to Zoe’s dad’s record label too. Uncanny. Poor Jessika almost feels like she’s the ‘special VIP’ in her own song, not ‘it’s me, Jenny B’.
The song is rubbish, almost as cheap as the TV set in the final, that was held in Bratislava, marking perhaps the first time a Eurovision national final has been held in a different country to the one whose entry it is selecting. We may never understand the full workings of the complicated process it’s taken to get here, but it’s left a bad taste in many mouths. Fans – and potential artists – are left unsure as to how fair it’s really been.
My marks; nul points!
Will it qualify? Not even after all of this palaver!