Anthem - Intellect

Signifying Europe
‘feel like going away / when there’s no more sunshine in the house’. This celebration of
holiday trips first stays within Europe’s borders, mentioning Amsterdam, Copenhagen,
Capri, London and Paris as destinations. However, there is then an allusion to the
globally connecting force of US music culture: ‘We’re European girls / and the things
we love / we find them here, from London to Paris / even if the music is connected / live
from Radio L.A.’ Yes, ‘We like the old continent / with background music USA’, and to
the global outlook is then also added images of ‘Indian summer’ and ‘African sunsets’.
In fact, there is an increasing ambiguity opening up a rift in the initial Eurocentrism,
when at the end the words ‘The weather is nice in California / but Saint-Tropez is also
good’ seem to place Europe as the second best. The song describes Europe as a united
but diverse site of pleasure, and compares it as an old continent with the youthful
United States as a given centre of the modern universe.
These two songs thus propose popular music, television media and tourism as
uniting tools. This unification still only included the good ‘old’ western half of the
continent. It was no mere coincidence that it was in Zagreb, Slovenia 1990, the year
after the breakdown of the Communist Bloc, that no less than the two most successful
tunes explicitly thematised European fraternity. It was evidently a moment where good
music makers, artists and producers agreed with the wide audience that the European
project had a renewed urgency. Still none of these two tunes explicitly widened the
concept of Europe to include also the part that had for so long been confined behind
the iron curtain.
On a joint second position (with equal votes as France) was Ireland’s Liam Reilly
with his own ‘Somewhere in Europe’. Singing from his grand piano, dressed in shirt
and tie but a loose brown jacket and trousers, and backed by two female singers,
Reilly sang as an ‘I’ to a ‘you’ about having been separated but wanting to reunite: ‘We
should be together, and maybe we just might / if you could only meet me somewhere
in Europe tonight.’ The text mentions a wide range of European destinations—Paris,
Rome, Amsterdam, German Black Forest, the Adriatic Sea and Seville—all of which
are firmly located in the old, western part of Europe, and again focuses on tourist
destinations and leisure-time practices. Such nostalgia for happy memories of lazy
nightlife may be interpreted as a conservative lament for old Europe’s lost innocence,
rather than a celebration of the recent developments.
Italy won that same year of 1990 with Toto Cotugno’s own composition ‘Insieme
1992’. It was characteristic that this year the old West European nations favoured
Ireland while Italy got more high points from the comparably few East European
countries that had at that time entered the competition. Cotugno was a popular singer,
performing here in all white, in front of five mixed-gender backup vocals. The song
has a typical Italian pop sensibility, with melody hooks that are easy to remember and
sing, and the song builds up an increasing pressure as it rolls along; a real popular hit
with a symphonic sound on a steady walking beat. ‘Insieme’ means ‘together’, and the
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