Werloc

That moment when you realise that half of your all time favourite artists are Irish and that @OlympicIRL now has a list whenever he wants to score a 12 I'm a simp for Irish music.

To put it into perspective: What Lithuanians think Folk is: What Folk really is: I've had to explain myself a lot in conversations for why I like folk music far too much but yeah, I'd dare say it's actually the most intimate genre of music, with the lyrics, raw emotions, subtle choices of melody and instrumentation, the approach towards a more natural and raw sound in the mixing & mastering of the vocals, I can't praise folk music enough. Laura Marling is awesome, All The Luck In The World, Gemma Hayes, Benjamin Francis Leftwich, Sufjan Stevens, City and Colour, Gavin James, I could go on and on

I'm happy you can be proud of your traditional music, I'd rather die than expose the forum to traditional Lithuanian music. Let's just say it's probably not great if your traditional 'pop' music has a tag of 'wedding music' and is not appropriate to listen to for anybody under the age of 45 Another irk that I have with traditional Lithuanian music is that my favourite genre of music is folk and most Lithuanians associate it with Lithuanian folk music (that is usually performed with a lot of vocalists and a lot of instruments) opposed to actual folk music with 1-2 vocalists, 1-4 instruments and lyrics that make you think about life in a multitude of ways.

Well, as much as it's a fair point that Dua is not a true representation of the country's music, it's also something you could say about all mainstream and industrial music. Then you have to think what's the extent of it being an accurate representation. Would it work if Dua sang "New Rules" in Albanian? If yes, why? If no, would she need to scrap all of the arrangement in favour of local instrumentation? Pop music rarely has cultural ties when thrown in international waters, because it has to appeal to the United States and UK. If it doesn't your music career is pretty much country-bound rather than international. Yes, larger and more influential countries have their own niche of pop, examples: JPop, KPop, Reggaetone (now solidified as pop music from Spanish speaking countries), but for smaller and less influential countries, pop tend to follow the trends of more influential countries, for example the Lithuanian worship of Scandinavian pop and hiring Swedish songwriters to save us in Eurovision. Another point that you could make, specifically for Dua Lipa is that she didn't grow up in the country she's based from, which is why you can't really expect her to have deep-rooted cultural ties when making music or even the simple fact on how little control she probably has on what music she is making. But yeah, what I'm saying is that it's more of a smaller country lack of identity in pop music. I could show you 10 Lithuanian pop songs and you wouldn't find a single Lithuanian thing in them, but that would still be considered as a representation of that nation's music, just not the cultural representation, I guess.

I wonder what's going on in Belize right now

Apparently 4F is also going to dress Polish, Latvian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovakian, Greek and Macedonian athletes for Tokyo as well. Good luck, guys @Vojthas @rybak @DaniSRB @dcro @hckosice @Janakis

Okay, so first they postpone the Olympics and now this... Our athletes can't catch a break...

In a few years from now we're going to have extra rules for entries. Like what level of popularity can't the contestants exceed I understand where you're coming from with the viewpoint of over-produced music, but at the end of the day, there are still some songs that those artists shouldn't be able to lose to, if we're actually judging music here But honestly, what the fuck do I even know when that song has over 200 million views. Seeing as I know a lot of very talented artists that struggle to reach 10K, I can say that the world is very cruel, when a podcast in Spanish has 20x times more views than the biggest Lithuanian song in the entire history of our country. Today's a bad day for me, not gonna lie

I think the real problem is that people can't take off the nameplates or can't tone down their ideals when judging. It's like somewhat hating on Eurovision for political voting, yet TISC really has its own consistent problems. Old famous international artists - good Relevant international artists famous here and now - bad Bryan Adams, The Cranberries, Bob Marley, Eddy Grant, John Lennon, Roxette - good Shawn Mendes, Charlie Puth, Dua Lipa, Childish Gambino - bad (named the most recent cases that I could remember, won't go through the entire history of TISC now ) Then of course to throw off my theory, stuff like The Script, Kodaline, Birdy + Rhodes or Rag'N'Bone Man somehow win the entire competition. But wake me up when it's someone outside Ireland or UK.

If this isn't the most TISC thing ever, then I don't know what is... Top 5 Spotify artist losing to a talking man. I no longer know if these things are out of spite that someone sent famous artists or what, but yeah, shocked and not shocked at the same time

Well, the Baltic Biathlon cup stage 1 is going to start next weekend, but yeah, there's not going to be too much hype around it Edit: To elaborate more, on the 31st there's going to be a shooting competition as well as a sprint + cross country running whilst on the 1st of August there will be a sprint + roller ski

That moment when you realise that all of the years that you've spent creating an absurd amount of templates were preparing you for this.

That moment when you come back home after a small trip and get all excited for the results of the first day, because it's the 22nd now, only to see that it's a couple of minutes past midnight and the results are not here for the next twenty hours

Well, it would probably look like a list of 7 nations that you didn't send added with a nation that you've chosen, unless you didn't know the artist that you chose.

I'm honestly intrigued how'd the number go up to 8, though I know that would probably be spoiler territory.

I too liked a few songs more than I did the rest of the songs, don't sue me.

That's 21 people off of @OlympicIRL's hit list. The other nine sending the votes an hour before the deadline might not be that lucky.

I wonder who was in charge in figuring out how to break the ties

member when Serbia, Canada and Poland were multi-juries? I member

honestly, it just felt like every other single disco song with words like boogie, rhythm and groove

Damn, minus the guy and some change of the lyrics and this could be a very legit performance.

The real question behind the South Korean performance is why were the poor backing vocalists dressed in black forced to stay on stage and merrily dance along to the track of the dude that brought his own backing vocalists? I feel like this is a total hostage situation

#BringBackAllOfTheLithuanianWomenThatQuitInTheLastFourYearsSoThatWeHaveAWomen'sTeamAgainSoWeCouldRunCompetitiveMixedRelaysWhichWouldHelpTheActualGoodTeamToQualifyFourMenIntoTheOlympics

I think we're overestimating the amount of time we're going to be judging the songs. The real struggle is when you have to compare them with other 20 songs that you have on your shortlist. In this situation, the 1v1 scenario gives a lot more lenience to the judges. For example, if I want to kill myself before even getting to the chorus, it's highly likely I'll need only 30 seconds to decide the winner of that specific match. Yeah, it is likely that you get to judge two songs that you like and struggle a bit, but the percentage of mismatches is going to be huge and it might even continue to be huge depending on who makes it out of groups and how the judges are going to be allocated in further stages. Songs that you really like might even get knocked out without you ever deciding anything (in a scenario where the song is in the same group as your representative or you not being allocated to judge it in quarters/semis etc)

Did they discover our biathlon thread? If so, we want more individual races @ibu