This is everything you think it is, and yet nothing like you think it is.
At first look, this is the classic Marmite song, a man that’s clearly taking the piss singing a song that *sounds* like it’s taking the piss in a language that hardly anyone understands with a hook that has been seemingly been written with the express intent to get the drunks of Europe picking the phone up and thinking that “This is Eurovision” and even has a crowd pleasing bit of the old banging techno. This entire song is a cliché.
However, it’s also *not* that. It’s a song in the style that the singer is known for which is actually about his father, which you only get to see in the final 30 seconds of the preview video where Joost stands in the burning house and he says that he misses his dad every day and he listened to him. And that’s the key to this song. We know that the first 2:30 are going to be all sorts of batshit on stage and I fully expect one hell of a show – I also expect the ending to be Joost and a spotlight singing the last 4 lines down the camera and getting into your consciousness.
People have likened this to Kaarija, principally because they have nothing else to compare it to, but lets go down that road. It’s cleverer than Kaarija insofar as it has an actual message and isn’t about getting pissed on very expensive drink and being a human centipede. This is sailing into the final because the aforementioned televoters are going to be so pissed when itt comes on last, they’ll pick the phone up. In the final, the Juries are going to see a song with deeper lyrics than people think, plus that message, plus one hell of a performance.
It has all the ingredients to not only be on the UK clip shows for ever and a day, but to stand up as a decently written winner at the same time.
