Joost Klein took revenge on Eurovision
A middle finger to the respectability of the Eurovision Song Contest and the hypocrisy of the EBU. No, not metaphorical, but real. The Eurovision Song Contest 2024 had the merit of having made the whole of Europe discover a rock star. Joost Klein doesn't make rock music, but a rock star is one in attitude. He would probably have won Eurovision if only he hadn't been expelled a few hours before the final of the event, which instead ended with the triumph of the Swiss Nemo and his “The code”: with “Europe”, a piece as ingenious as it is paranoidstory of an orphan – that is him, a heartbreaking story: he was 12 years old when his father died due to cancer and a year later his mother suffered a cardiac arrest – who travels around Europe looking for a place in the world,
he had arrived in Malmö as an outsider and then found himself upsetting every prediction. Evidently the exclusion from the Eurovision final really didn't go down well with him, despite the fact that the numbers crowned him in all respects as the true winner of the race: “Europapa” has totaled almost 100 million streams on Spotify (91, to be precise), while the winner Nemo with “The code” stopped at “just” 40 million listeners. So when over the weekend he found himself performing on the stage of a charity festival organized in Vancouver, Canada, by the rapper bbno $, after singing “Europapa” Klein let out a resounding “fuck you” at Eurovision and the EBU, the consortium of European broadcasters that organizes the event and which collectively takes every decision relating to the event. “Fuck Eurovision, fuck Ebu,” Joost Klein told the festival crowd, to applause.
Joost Klein didn't just want to participate in Eurovision, he wanted to have the power to make it fail, one might say, quoting Paolo Sorrentino and his “Great Beauty”. There is a precise moment in which the former Dutch YouTuber, iconoclastic, rebellious and non-conformist attitudehas become a sort of hero for the anti-Israeli faction of the “Eurovisioners”, as the fans of the event are called, disappointed and surprised by the EBU's choice to confirm the participation of the Israeli singer Eden Golan at the event It is the night between Thursday 9th and Friday 10th May.
The press conference of the ten artists who won the last ten passes to the final during the second of the two Eurovision semi-finals takes place in a room of the Malmö Arena. Among these are the highly contested Eden Golan, who finds herself at the center of the media storm raised by the participation of the country she represents in Eurovision, and Joost Klein. While pro-Palestine protests are raging outside the Malmö Arena, pushing the police and security men to turn the sports hall hosting Eurovision into a veritable bunker, a Polish journalist provocatively asks the singer: “.Are you aware that by your presence at Eurovision you are endangering the public and other participants?”. She decides not to answer the question. It's at that point that Klein intervenes, urging her: “Why not?”. The videos of the back-and-forth immediately made the rounds on social media.
When on the morning of Saturday 11 May, the day of the final, the EBU issues a statement confirming the decision to expel the Dutch singer from the competitionmany wonder if only those “inappropriate behaviors” to which the “Europapa” singer would have let himself go backstage against an operator who continued to film him even though he had asked not to be filmed by the cameras or whether Klein instead you don't pay the price for that back and forth with Eden Golan. In the Malmö Arena bunker, rumors and hypotheses are becoming increasingly uncontrolled among insiders and reporters. Klein had already been unable to perform at the rehearsals the day before and the audience in the arena had sung his “Europapa” a cappella: the scene was also repeated at the last rehearsals before the live broadcast. And when the supreme leader of Eurovision is broadcast worldwide Martin Österdahl – he is the executive supervisor of the event – he is assigned to explain, as per tradition, the voting mechanism, the boos from the audience drown out his voice.
After being excluded from the Eurovision Song Contest, Joost Klein no longer gave interviews. The lawyer who is assisting him speaks for the Dutch singer, after the operator with whom Klein allegedly argued heatedly backstage decided to file a complaint: the provisional date of the trial has been set for the beginning of June. On the official YouTube channel of the event the most viewed video of this edition is that of his “Europapa”which he has achieved to date 35 million views overall. The video of his only performance on the Malmö Arena stage, in the semi-final, has racked up 18 million views. Figures that other competitors' clips don't even come close to. And in the Netherlands there are already those who are ready to support Joost Klein's possible re-nomination for Eurovision 2025.
