Eurovision: A Weird Form Of Therapy For A National Inferiority Complex

Armchair psychoanalysis of Iceland’s pop obsession

Eurovision has always been an oddity. A kind of quasi-Olympics for questionable pop music, this annual event provides kebab shops around the world with their soundtrack for the coming year. It’s that certain brand of machinistic one-size-fits-all party music that folks with megatonne car speakers use to vibrate the windows of your house, leaving you thinking: “Who the fuck listens to this crap?”

The answer, it turns out, is a staggering amount of people. In 2024, an estimated 163 million people tuned in. The most recent Super Bowl, by comparison, got a paltry 127 million. Pathetic! Maybe they should have booked Lordi featuring Conchita Wurst instead of Kendrick to put them over the top.

With this many eyes on the competition, it’s hard to put your finger on who this audience is, exactly — because it’s kind of everyone. But some things are abundantly clear. The moms love it. The gays love it. And the Icelanders? They really fucking love it.

It’s a very particular brand of mania that sweeps over Iceland each year as the competition approaches. Rumoured candidates become hot potatoes in the water cooler. The selection process is more heated than a national election. The competition’s early rounds are near-universally viewed. And the finals? A Christmas-sized national event when anyone wishing to film a post-apocalyptic show anywhere in Iceland would have access to entirely empty streets for a solid four hours.

Why Iceland is so obsessed with Eurovision is a very good question. Let’s be real — it’s not for its quality. Eurovision’s vibe is somewhere between a music festival in a mall, and a talent show at some kind of council-run town concert where they had too much cava at the planning meeting and blew the annual budget. So why does this song contest that features “cheesy musical acts, over-the-top costumes, hair, and makeup, cliched presenters and shameless brochure-like tourist ads for the host country” hold so much sway over Icelanders?

The answer, perhaps, lies in the size of the stage. You see, Iceland rarely gets a chance to compete with the bigger countries of the world. Except for a couple of sporting outliers — a handful of silver and bronze Olympic medals, a quarter-final appearance at Euro 2016, that sort of thing — Iceland is barely a blip on the radar. But at Eurovision? All eyes are on Iceland for a solid few minutes. Every country in Europe is briefly obligated to acknowledge Iceland’s existence. And to score us! There’s even a chance that, for this moment, in this context, Iceland will be proven — definitively, democratically, and before the eyes of the world — to be BETTER THAN DENMARK!

While this moment of release for centuries of pent-up national pride is enough to send the country briefly feral, it’s not enough to meaningfully heal Iceland’s national inferiority complex. No stage in the world is quite that big. But hey. There’ll be glitter. There’ll be booze, and snacks, and solidarity. And when we lose? There’s always next year.

Read our cover feature exploring how a divided Iceland approaches Eurovision here.