“All participating broadcasters will be responsible for ensuring that all necessary measures are taken within their respective delegations and teams to safeguard the interests and integrity of the Eurovision Song Contest and for ensuring that under no circumstances will it be brought into disrepute in any way.” This is the part of the official regulation of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) that questioned whether the The debt from Nebulossa might represent Spain in Eurovision 2024.
Asked regarding the matter, María Eizaguirre, director of Communication and Participation at RTVE, declared on Sunday that the corporation is not excessively concerned regarding possible censorship, since the word has another official meaning. “The proposal is clear. If you look at what the word means in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language, the definition is very clear. It is a song that we understand that the lyrics are completely in accordance with current regulations,” she commented in Benidorm. The difference with the fuck Italian is that the word bitch has several meanings, argued the spokesperson for the public entity. But the 2023 case ruins that argument. Luke Black acted on behalf of Serbia with I’m just sleepywhich included the expression Game over, bitch, whose last word literally means fox or bitch, also an animal. He eliminated that word from the sentence without affecting the issue. He did not say it on stage, but the audience did.
The song The debt follows the irreverent, unprejudiced and empowered line of some of the previous songs by Nebulossa, a duo formed in 2018 by the married couple Mery Bas (55 years old) and Mark Dasousa (47 years old). After their performance in the first semi-final of the Benidorm Fest, in which they were the winner of the night, the group explained that the message is not only feminist; which also winks at the LGTBI+ community and all those who feel outside the norm. Its intention is to redefine a word that has been used to judge others into a positive concept. Taking into account that one of the values on which the festival is based is defending tolerance through music, RTVE hoped to use that argument in case the EBU had presented any objection.
Once a country’s representative to Eurovision has been chosen, its public corporation – in this case RTVE – must present the proposal to the European body, including, among other things, its lyrics, a studio recording and the initial idea of what its performance will be like. staging. Then, Martin Österdahl, who is the executive supervisor of Eurovision, communicates whether the song complies with the regulations. When consulted, RTVE does not specify when or how this process was carried out, taking into account that The debt became the Spanish representative in the early hours of Saturday to Sunday, but she does reiterate in response to the EBU’s response that the song complies with its rules.
Eurovision’s censorious record has been quite ambivalent. Rap band Citi Zēni had to remove two words from their song Eat your salad in 2022. Specifically, they were pussy (which in its colloquial meaning is understood as pussy, and fuck (fuck). On the other hand, Nina Morato sneaked in a whore in the French proposal for Eurovision 1994, I’m a real boy. He said: “I know that I am his love, but damn, there are days that weigh me down.” In reality, at Eurovision it poses many more problems to include a political message in a festival that calls itself apolitical, an adjective that is often questioned. Banned references to Vladimir Putin have ended with the voluntary abandonment of some countries or disqualification by the EBU.
Eizaguirre insisted this Monday morning, in the program Mornings of La 1, in which there is tranquility among the Spanish Eurovision delegation. “The song has a very powerful message, we want it to be well understood throughout Europe. For that, we are preparing the lyrics in various languages, such as English and even Swedish. It is regarding the message arriving and arriving in the right way,” she explained.
