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‘Ich komme!’ The smutty Eurovision songs that dodge the censors
From ensuring your swearwords are in languages other than English to outrageous euphemisms, contestants in the famously camp extravaganza have ways to avoid being toned down …
After the 2024 edition of the world’s largest live music contest was largely overshadowed by political positioning over the war in Gaza, many artists at this year’s event in the Swiss city of Basel are returning to what they like to do best: celebrating the act of lovemaking in pop songs. It means English-language songs about sex at Eurovision have to either resort to schoolyard synonyms – “I want to do it with him all day long” sang Israeli group Ping Pong in 2000 – or extravagant innuendo, such as Czech singer Mikolas Josef’s “I know you bop-whop-a-lu bop on his wood bamboo” in 2018. Mais putain, il y a des jours, French singer Nina Morato sang in 1994: “But fuck me, there are days.” Moldova’s 2006 entrant managed to conjure up all sorts of filthy images in viewers’ minds with the lyric: “Hey loco, please espera un poco / And I’ll give you my choco”.In 2012 hip hop group Trackshittaz performed a song in such impenetrably strong Austrian dialect that it must have distracted the censors from their post-watershed name and title of their entry, “Woki mit deim Popo”, “Wiggle your ass”.
Or read this on The Guardian
