I've
been watching "Novaia Volna" on television—it's a (mostly) post-Soviet
song contest held in Latvia every year. Call me a cynic, but whenever I
watch it (this is my third year in a row) it seems fixed. There are
always a few contestants who are in a completely different league from
the others. This year there's a contestant named Ani something who
sings her own songs, has back up singers, dancers, choreography—the
works. Then, the next contestants up are a duo from Macedonia who offer
up a lame cover of that Eric Clapton song from the 1990s (the one about
his dead son—"If I saw you in heaven" or something like that). How can
these two acts even be in the same competition? It's like taking an act
from Las Vegas and making them compete against someone performing in
the Karaoke bar down the street. And what about that group from Minsk
who did the lame version of "Back in the USSR?" with the furry Russian shapkas?
This is really one of the best groups they could find among the
thousands of entries they supposedly received? They elicited about as
much excitement as Avtograf did when they performed (via satellite) at
Live-Aid.
(By
the way, when I first came to Russia in 1993 and 1998 I asked everybody
I met about Avtograf because they were the only Soviet band I'd ever
heard of up until then—but nobody knew who they were. Who were they?
Were they an invention of the Kremlin especially for Live-Aid? Were
they made up by MTV? We may never know).
My
theory is that the Novaia Volna folks choose the winners in advance,
then set them up to compete against a bunch of losers in order to
ensure that the winner really is one of the best acts in the
competition.
(One
other aside: Turkish musicians are definitely a lot better at
pretending to play their instruments to canned music than Russians are.
Half the time when the camera zooms in on a guitar or piano solo, the
musician seems totally taken by surprise and scrambles to make a go of
faking it. It reminds me of when I saw Ibrahim Tatlıses in concert in
St. Petersburg in 2004. His warm-up act was a wretched one-hit wonder
calling herself "Azeri kızı," who lip-synched throughout her
performance. She came out a second time while Ibrahim was taking a
break, and in the middle of her performance he came back on stage,
turned off her CD player, and tried to get her to sing a duet with him.
She fled the stage, and Ibrahim took over. Say what you will about the
man, but Ibo's a real professional, and he sang the whole way through).
Anyway,
tonight the professionals are on, so I get to watch my man Phillipp
Kirkorov instead. At least he's not covering a Beatles tune that's
older than I am.
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