Eurovision 69 is the most sexual song contest in history

A Maltese word resembling the c-word in English has been banned, while the song in Finnish can sing about an explosive female orgasm. Double standards?

Happy Eurovision week! Today the contestants for the 69th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest are right now walking the turquoise carpet in Basel, Switzerland - and the wild outfits are a preview of what’s in store this year. The two semi-finals will be aired live across Europe Tuesday and Thursday night, followed by the final on Saturday. Eurovision remains the most-watched live entertainment show in the world each year, with viewership far higher than the Oscars or the Superbowl in America.

Last year Israel’s participation made Eurovision 68 the most political song contest in history. This year Israel will still be there, and is still courting controversy by sending a survivor of the October 7th attacks to sing with a barely-veiled political message. However, so far this year it feels like the controversy is not going to overshadow the contest, with attention to the issue significantly down from last year. Although, as you can see from this live turquoise carpet broadcast, there are lots of people waving the Palestinian flag in the crowd. It may be that people have lost the energy to fight the European Broadcasting Union on this. But it’s worth pointing out that, just like last year, not a single national broadcaster has threatened to pull out of the contest over Israel’s participation (unlike with Russia in 2022, where at least five countries were going to pull out if Russia wasn’t banned).

For me, the most interesting aspect of this year’s contest is language - specifically the languages that countries have chosen to sing in and the languages that did or didn’t have to change their lyrics because of offensive content. As I wrote last month, this year has seen the highest number of countries in Eurovision history voluntarily choose to sing in a language other than English. I say voluntarily because before 1999 (except for a brief period between 1973 and 1977) there was an ‘English ban’ in place, with a rule requiring every country to sing in their national language. I wrote last month about why that might be happening at this particular moment in time (hint: the songs were chosen after Donald Trump was elected US president).

But the other interesting linguistic issue this year is about what has been censored and what hasn’t. Each year the EBU, the association of European, Middle East and North African public broadcasters which has staged the Eurovision Song Contest with its members since 1956, reviews the lyrics to each country’s submitted songs to see if they violate the contest’s rules barring political or offensive content. Normally, an objection needs to be made by one of the other countries in order for the EBU reference group (made up of national broadcaster representatives) to consider banning a song’s lyrics.

As I wrote last year, the ban on political content in songs has evolved over time and is still quite vague. Russia was furious in 2016 when Ukraine’s song 1944 was allowed in unaltered (and eventually won) even though it was a very thinly veiled reference to Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. The line can be difficult to ascertain. In 2009 after Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Georgia’s song “We Don’t Wanna Put In” was disqualified for being a coded critique of Putin. In 2015 Armenia had to change the title and lyrics of its song “Don’t Deny” for being a veiled reference to Turkey’s denials of the Armenian genocide (Turkey had already pulled out of Eurovision by then so Erdogan couldn’t object, so Azerbaijan did it for them).

The rules governing offensive content are even more vague. For years there were no rules, because no country had pushed the boundary and tried their luck with a sexually explicit song. What Eurovision had instead was the classic innuendo songs, parodied perfectly in Will Ferrell’s Fire Saga movie with the song “Ja Ja Ding Dong”. Examples of this include 1965’s winner "Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son" written by Serge Gainsbourg and 1975’s winner “Ding-a-Dong”. But the sexual innuendo was so buried that it would have gone over most peoples’ heads, and as far as I know there were never any objections within the EBU about these songs.

After the transformation of Eurovision into a more modern contest in 2000, countries started pushing the boundaries more. It was also after 2000 that the contest gained a major gay following, and many of the songs started pushing the envelope in terms of homosexuality and gender. These have generally been allowed by the EBU, which knows which side their bread is buttered on these days. They have even proactively protected this LGBT content, banning China from airing the contest anymore after Beijing censored a gay kiss in the Irish entry in 2018.

But the EBU was faced with a challenge this year when countries sent songs with lyrics far more sexually explicit than the contest has ever seen before. The most glaring example was the Maltese song “Serving Kant”, a song entirely in English except when the singer uses the Maltese word ‘kant’, which means singing. But it was clearly meant to sound like “serving cunt”, an expression used by drag queens to mean that they’re looking powerfully feminine. While it’s likely that only gay viewers would have even understood the reference, the BBC objected saying they couldn’t air before the watershed a song with the most offensive word in the English language, and the EBU made Malta change the lyrics. The song is now just called “Serving” and the singer makes a kind of moan instead of saying the word kant (we can expect the audience will help her out by screaming the word - and probably the English variety).

Malta objected, saying that this decision is discriminatory toward the Maltese language. But that argument was hard to take given that this is the first time that Malta has used any Maltese word in a Eurovision song since 1972 (English is a national language in Malta, so they were able to get around the English ban in the previous era). Personally, I think the BBC and EBU have a point when they point out that the song is entirely in English except for this one word, which is clearly being used in order to sound like the homophone English word. However an alternative solution could have been to ask for the word to be spelled out on a screen each time she says it, making it clear that she’s saying kant and not cunt.

But there are even more linguistic sensitivities around this. It raised more than a few eyebrows that Malta had to change their lyrics because a word sounds like a part of the female anatomy in English while Finland didn’t have to change their entry which is a far more sexually explicit song about an explosive female organism. Apparently, that’s OK because she’s singing in Finnish and nobody outside Finland and Estonia will understand it. But take a look at these lyrics. They are wild.

My gates open
I am Erika
Do what you want and when you come, I’m coming with you

I’m coming, I’m coming
And I echo loudly: I’m coming
And we come together and we’re like I’m coming

I am Erika, you’ve got stamina
Hit on me again, grab my ass
And when you want some love again, shout Encore
And baby I’m coming

Baby you can still fall in love with yourself
Stars in your eyes and me on top of you
Baby you deserve everything good here

Needless to say, there’s no way the EBU would have allowed these lyrics in the contest if they were in English. But as the guys over at the excellent Mysteries of the Euroverse podcast observed last month, if the broadcaster from the only country that speaks Finnish doesn’t object to lyrics (they sent it after all), what grounds does the EBU have to censor it? Wouldn’t you be meddling in something that actually nobody cares about? “So now the rule the EBU is moving forward with, theoretically, is: if you have a double entendre [that sounds like something in English], a significant proportion of the song has to be in another language,” Charlie noted. “Or, you can put your pornographic lyrics in a language that nobody speaks.”

Co-host Magnus noted how new this challenge is for the EBU: “You see the title, I’m Coming, and you think this is another double entendre situation. It’s going to be, “I’m coming…home. I’m coming…to work. But no, when you look at the translated Finnish lyrics, there’s no double entendre. She makes it clear what it’s really about. So with this one it’s a different challenge.” Or it would be, if the song was in English.

But this reasoning gets to the truth of the matter that the EBU would probably not want to say out loud: the default language of Eurovision is English, and everything else (including French, even if the hosts are made to excruciatingly sound out Europe’s former lingua franca for a few sentences each year) is a national language for which different standards apply. The number of non-English songs may be going up, but the baseline is still English. The situation for French is obviously very different from Finnish, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the EBU would have also let this slide if this song was fielded in French (not by France obviously, but maybe by a more fun country like Belgium).

What’s interesting though is that many broadcasters offer subtitle translations during the broadcast. They’re usually not shown on the actual broadcast though and the national hosts, for whatever reason, don’t ever seem to tell viewers that they have this option if they go into their closed captioning settings. But the option is indeed there (I’m told the BBC apparently did this in the past but no longer?). So if a broadcaster is having to write out the Finnish lyrics in English and display them in the closed captioning, is this not a watershed violation? Perhaps not if only an infinitesimal number of viewers have those subtitles on.

The other intensely sexual song this year is the entry from Australia, entitled “Milkshake Man” (I think you can see where this is going). But this one is in the more traditional model Eurovision is familiar with: innuendo walking just up to the line without ever crossing it, and without ever using a ‘bad word’. Here are some of the lyrics:

Come and take a sip from my special cup
I heard that you could use a little pick-me-up
What can get you high when you're oh-so sad?
It's the milk from the milkshake man

They drink my milk all across the land
I can tell you want a taste of the milkshake man

Drink it every day and before you know it
You'll be bigger and stronger with harder bones

“Excusez-moi monsieur, avez-vous du lait pour moi?”

These lyrics have been given the green light - though I’ve heard they requested that he change some of the staging in which his enthusiastic shaking of the milkshake could be interpreted as something else. It’s in the grand tradition of “Ding-a-Dong” innuendo, though without a doubt this is walking much closer to the line than we’ve ever seen before.

In fact, the whole show will be far more sexual than we’ve ever seen before. There are a few other entries I could mention, but I’ll let you discover them yourselves when you watch the shows this week (and if you aren’t watching, what kind of European are you??). Tune in on your country’s public broadcaster at 9pm CET on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for the titillation.