Not even a lack of Eurovision can stop the Jukebox from covering Eurovision!
[Video]
[4.20]
Katie Gill: Every year in Eurovision, there’s a song that wants to push its way to the top through sheer obnoxiousness. Some years, that song is obnoxious and legitimately good. Some years, that song is obnoxious and so bad it’s good. Some years, that song is obnoxious and baaaad. “Uno”…doesn’t exactly know where it fits. There are parts where the song is legitimately good: it’s catchy as hell and the chorus is exactly the sort of slightly nonsensical that Eurovision lives and dies on. There are parts where the song is legitimately BAD: that fire engine noise about a minute into the video is absolutely horrific. It all comes together to create something that’s purposefully obnoxious in a way that’s designed to gain your vote and be stuck in your head for the remainder of the year. And at least in those fronts? It 100 percent succeeded.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Cancelling Eurovision this year made me sad, but at least it means that this ridiculous earworm didn’t get a chance to win and send us to Moscow 2021 2022 whenever Europe stops being a COVID-19-ravaged mess whenever the EBU next puts on a show. And make no mistake, there’s no way this introductory Spanish language course — subtitle: Counting to Six for Fun and Continental Domination — wasn’t going top 3. It’s still the closest thing the contest has had to actually having Aqua submit an entry (other entries have tried to emulate the cheer of Aqua without having any of their cheek), so I like it for that. But quite apart from just counting in the chorus, it feels underwritten, like they had one, two, three, four annoying ideas to fill the song. That’s enough for Eurovision. But to work outside that context, it might have needed five, six.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: Aqua, all is forgiven.
[1]
Will Adams: Not sure about this new direction Sofi Tukker is heading.
[3]
Nortey Dowuona: Flushed, overheated chords lead crackling percussion and zipping synths as Little Big’s throaty growl and nasal squeal skid over dumping drum trucks. A shrieking synth horn hops along the sides.
[5]
Andrew Karpan: The whole conceit of “Uno” is so funny that it makes me want to ask more of my own popstars, whose jokes are always too well-written and fearfully clever. Here, the St. Petersburg eurostars suggest that everything is a joke: the voices, the piecemeal salsa beat, the song itself–which begins as a saccharine duet but then uncomfortably forces itself into a sloshy idea of EDM that feels at least half a decade out of date. It’s the brash dumbness of grocery store music elevated to high art.
[8]
Iain Mew: I deliberately went into Eurovision with as little context as possible for many years, and had plenty of moments of amazement as a result. If I was hearing Little Big out of nowhere I might find “Uno”‘s day-glo insistence a pleasure. Having met them on the Jukebox a couple of years ago with something far more so, my main reaction is to be disappointed to see them tone down to something this safe.
[4]
Alex Clifton: If I had to pick one song that has inadvertently defined my Quarantine Year, it’s this. I usually end up listening to my Eurovision favourites throughout the year for comfort, a reminder of a time when music gets to be bright and splashy and fun. Obviously, that did not happen this year, but I’ve had “Uno” on repeat weekly since the video dropped in March. On paper, parts of this song are actively terrible — the second song of 2020 to refer to sex as “that yummy yummy,” for instance, and the idea of miscounting in Spanish on purpose gets old fast — but I can’t hate this song. I love it with my entire body. It’s beautifully stupid. It has no purpose other than to make you dance. While the actual best Eurovision song this year has a lovely message about fatherhood, this has zero deep meaning. Every time I hear it, my brain remembers it can make serotonin, and for a couple minutes I’m thrown into a silly, zany rush. It is crack. I’m fond of novelty songs in general so it comes as no surprise that I’m a sucker for this one, but I didn’t know that it’d be a standout for the soundtrack of a strange year. I just hope Little Big learn some more Spanish for the next song they release.
[9]
John S. Quinn-Puerta: Personally, no puedo con esto. I would not be surprised if the chorus gets a second life in elementary school Spanish classrooms.
[2]
Alfred Soto: I don’t mind squeaky and I sure don’t mind fast. “Squeaky-fast” represents a modifier combination of genuine malevolence.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: The memers of “AK-47,” “Big Dick,” and similar songs meme on with similar results. Fitting that fake online Eurovision is represented by fake online fun.
[3]
Austin Nguyen: No part of “Uno” is exempt from being written in all-caps HYPERBOLE, from the contrast in pitch-shifted tones (Tayurskaya is as bright as pure sugar is sweet while Prusikin sounds like a pre-pubescent seventh-grader trying to prove his manhood) and mouth-popping break in the chorus, to the “dummy”/”yummy”/”chummy” rhyme innuendo and the burst of — synths? horns? kazoos? — that are all so brash you can barely tell them apart. Past evidence suggests otherwise, but who knew counting could hold a catchy and campy chorus on its own?
[7]
John Seroff: Both The Atlantic and The Week recently published long-form thought pieces (both heavily reliant on Sontag’s famous essay) on Donald Trump’s co-opting of camp, both as core personality and as the heart of his political posturing. One unsurprising takeaway from these articles is that deracinated camp — as bastardized well before the Trump era into a state of amoral, willfully ignorant, puerile dada — has become our reigning aesthetic in the most holistic and disturbing way; the culture wars are over and culture lost. If one somehow chooses to laud the homophobic and opportunistic Little Big as champions of this new camp, it would be nearly impossible not to invoke Sontag’s famous Ultimate Camp Statement in some way: “it’s good because it’s awful.” I would caution we also remember Sontag’s codicil: “Of course, one can’t always say that.” You’d assume that should be self-evident, but 171 million views suggest otherwise.
[1]
Ian Mathers: If you’re going to be this pointedly ridiculous in such a stylized fashion, you’ve gotta make it signifiy somethin’ (or even nothing!) or else it just falls so, so flat. Also it felt like there was some joke around them counting “one… two… four” for most of the chorus, but if they ever had a payoff I missed it.
[3]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: sorry can’t finish blurb have a headache -jsk
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