GreenJolly – Orange Revolution 2004 Mastermind

At this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Athens, the UK is pinning its hopes on rapper Daz Sampson’s song Teenage Life.

But it isn’t the first time that urban music has graced the event.

Back in 1995, the UK had not won Eurovision for 14 years, and the voting public chose a song with little resemblance to the contest’s standard fare of solid ballads and perky pop tunes.

Love City Groove’s soulful, laid-back track had some rapid-fire vocals courtesy of rapper Jay Williams and female band member Reason.

But their performance was not helped by the backing of a full orchestra, and the Eurovision juries’ reaction was decidedly mixed.

Bold choice

With two “douze points” from France and Austria but nine countries ignoring them, Love City Groove finished 10th.

It appeared the UK’s bold choice had not paid off, but back home the song reached a respectable number seven in the singles chart.

The failure of Love City Groove to sweep to victory with their contemporary sound was not enough to kill off rap at the contest.

In 1997, Denmark sent Kolig Kaj to Dublin with a song about a man who falls in love with the telephone operator.

The performance, which had to be in Danish, picked up just 25 points and trailed in 16th, a very long way from the UK’s Katrina and The Waves, who coasted to glory with a solid, anthemic pop tune.

Two years later and the Eurovision Song Contest entered a new era, where the orchestra was replaced by backing tracks, and entrants could sing in any language.

Dour delivery

Bosnian Dino Dervishalidovic went to Jerusalem only after the winners of the country’s national final were disqualified.

His dour delivery of a rap in Bosnian and a simple chorus in French was a success. It landed him seventh place and remains Bosnia’s best Eurovision result to date.

In 2005, Eurovision travelled east to Kiev, and Ukraine’s effort in front of a home crowd contained an element of rap and a dose of controversy.

Greenjolly’s song Razom Nas Bagato! was an anthem of the country’s Orange Revolution in 2004, but its political content had to be toned down so it would not flout contest rules.

The gritty song caused a storm in Kiev’s Palace of Sports, but failed to make an impact on Eurovision voters, finishing a distant 19th and relegating Ukraine to this year’s qualifying round.

Daz Sampson’s performing style will not be entirely alone in Athens – there is a taste of rap in both Poland and Moldova’s entries too.

And while the odds of rap succeeding at Eurovision may not be favourable, the UK performer has a good chance of standing out from the crowd in Greece.

The semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest takes place on 18 May and will be screened on BBC Three at 2000 BST. The grand final, on 20 May, will be shown on BBC One from 2000 BST.

news.bbc.co.uk

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Greenjolly, the band representing Ukraine in the final of the 50th Eurovision Song Contest in Kyiv with the song Razom nas bahato, will be visiting the Polish capital Warsaw on Sunday 15th May. Greenjolly will be taking part in a special concert marking the first anniversary of Poland’s membership of the European Union. Ukrainian President Victor Yuschenko will be present too and thank the Poles for their active support during the Orange Revolution.

Greenjolly will appear on stage together with several Polish hip-hop artists who recorded a Polish version of Razem nas bohato, which quickly managed to hit the top 10 in the Polish music charts in April. The Ukrainian representatives will be singing a sentence of the chorus of Razom nas bohato in Polish during the final of the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest. The Ukrainian entry is a well known song in Poland, mainly regarded as the symbol of the Orange Revolution, which was strongly supported in the country. The Ukrainian president Victor Yuschenko will be present in Warsaw to thank the Poles for their support and to show that Ukraine would also like to become a member of the European Union in the future. The 50th Eurovision Song Contest in Kyiv is often regarded as the first step in the pathway to an active membership. Greenjolly wil represent Ukraine in the final of the 50th Eurovision Song Contest in Kyiv, to take place on 21st May.

esctoday.com

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The Ukrainian representatives of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest have visited Riga (Latvia) today. During this one-day visit, GreenJolly presented the international verson of their entry, Together we are many.

GreenJolly’s day in Riga started at 8:00 with the live broadcasting of their interview for the breakfast show RITS.TV. With interviews for a youth programme and for the Russian breakfast programme the guys continued their promotion programme. Several internet media interviewed the Ukrainian Eurovision Song Contest representatives.

“We believe that every person should be active! Don’t be indifferent! If you witness injustice – don’t stand by! Don’t think that environmental and human trafficking problems do not concern you! Don’t be silent – protest! That is how we can make positive changes in our life. Be active and change your life for better. Do it together with us! That’s what we sing about”, the singers said. “We are very excited to bring our tour around Europe to Latvia as a symbol of the forthcoming Eurovision Song Contest in Ukraine. Today we have brought our song to Riga, tomorrow Riga will bring the Latvian entry to Kyiv. Exchange of hospitality and common values is of a great importance to us”, Roman Kalyn of GreenJolly said. While GreenJolly visited Riga, United States President George W. Bush also visited the capital of Latvia. “Unfortunately, we didn’t meet face to face, but virtually on the newspaper columns and in various news reports on Latvian television and radoi”, was GreenJolly’s statement.

esctoday.com

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Svante Stockselius is not a name likely to endure in infamy. This is because few will remember it, and fewer still be able to pronounce it. However, Mr Stockselius deserves all the opprobrium that can be heaped upon him. It was he, as executive of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, who decreed that Ukraine’s entry, Greenjolly, had to rewrite their song, or face expulsion. Mr Stockselius, it may reasonably be concluded, is a pompous, humourless jobsworth. He has also fumbled a glorious opportunity to render the wretched spectacle watchable.

Last December, Greenjolly’s song, Razom Nas Bagato! (Together We Are Many!) was the anthem of Ukraine’s revolution. Given that this year’s Eurovision is being held in Kiev – following 2004′s victory by leatherclad thunder goddess Ruslana – it would have made a rousing addition to an otherwise routinely dismal lineup. However, Mr Stockselius took exception to the song’s lyrics, which big up Viktor Yushchenko, the mottled survivor of a poisoning attempt who is now Ukraine’s president.

Eurovision, declared Mr Stockselius, is “non-political”. Maybe Mr Stockselius has never watched Eurovision, but “non-political” does not figure among the many names that the contest can rightly be called. Eurovision is legendary as an arena for settling diplomatic scores, venting ethnic grievance, baiting national rivals and undermining governments – and, what’s more, these moments are almost always the highlights.

Portugal’s 1974 entry – Paulo De Carvalho’s execrable After Goodbye – was used as the signal to launch the coup that unloaded a decades-old dictatorship. Throughout Franco’s rule, Spain’s entries were often thinly-veiled paeans to freedom (“I’m changing tomorrow, there’s no turning back,” warbled Karina in 1971′s Tomorrow I’m Coming Your Way). In April 1982, to demonstrate that democracy had not dampened their sense of humour, Spain’s Lucia came to the contest, held in a Britain at war with Argentina, and performed a tango.

The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was reflected in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first entry, in 1993: an appropriately shell-shocked and reproachful ditty called The Whole World’s Pain. Even the Middle East imbroglio had a turn – in a gesture demonstrating commendably rock’n'roll disregard for career prospects and personal safety, 2000′s Israeli entrant, Ping Pong, rounded off their number by waving Syrian flags and demanding peace.

More of this sort of thing should be encouraged, not less. It’s these cultural and political subtexts – as well as the ludicrous hair, cretinous hosts, painful scripted banter and sensationally dreadful clothes – that make Eurovision worth enduring.

Greenjolly are themselves splendidly dubious ring-ins: at the prompting of Ukraine’s new government, they and their rabble-rousing tune were ushered past Ukraine’s national heats straight into the final run-off, where there were mutterings that the phone-vote was as rigged as the election which prompted Ukraine’s revolution in the first place. Or does Mr Stockselius seriously think we’re tuning in for the music?

guardian.co.uk

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The suicide two weeks ago of former interior minister Yuri Kravchenko, a key witness in investigations into the outgoing leadership’s criminal exploits, has been widely blamed on the government putting its own interests before the legal process – a hallmark of ex-president Leonid Kuchma’s years in power.Mr Yushchenko’s announcement on March 1 that the murder four years ago of opposition journalist Georgy Gongadze had been “solved” – before the case had gone to court and with many questions still unanswered – met with widespread scepticism in the press and from Gongadze’s family. On March 8, President Yushchenko dismissed calls for the general prosecutor to resign over his handling of the case.

Under Mr Kuchma, Ukrainians became accustomed to declarations that high-profile crimes had been conveniently solved, only for officials later to retract their claims in the face of new evidence.

“I want to hear no more announcements, I want to see concrete steps,” Gongadze’s wife, Myroslava, said. Andrei Fedur, lawyer for the murdered journalist’s mother, said he would “refrain from offering congratulations for solving the case” and that he feared the government’s accusations against suspects “could simply disintegrate in court”.

Two weeks earlier, there had been controversy over an internal government dispute involving lucrative oil exports, which some suggested illustrated that the government has yet to conquer another of the old regime’s habits – combining business interests with politics.

In mid-February, controversy ensued after justice minister Roman Zvarych unsuccessfully attempted to block a cabinet decision to halt re-exports of oil from Ukraine.

it was alleged that the only reason he did this was so that the re-export could go ahead for 3 million tonnes of Russian oil belonging to the company Oil Tranzit, of which Mr Zvarych’s wife, Svetlana, is deputy general director.

When the cabinet stuck to its decision, Mr Zvarych threatened to resign – a powerful ultimatum to the fledgling government.

The timing of Mr Zvarych’s resignation threat was widely interpreted as a defence of his wife’s business interests.

Mr Zvarych, the son of an American millionaire, denied abusing his political position to further his wife’s interests, claiming the ban on oil re-export would itself encourage corruption. He pointed out that the government had been lobbied by other elements of the oil industry to introduce the ban.

Svetlana Zvarych vigorously denied any impropriety and said the government’s decision to halt oil re-exports was itself motivated by the interests of competitor oil traders. She told a Ukrainian website that Oil Tranzit had received government permission for the oil to be exported, and that by stopping the oil on the border the Ukrainian customs had broken the law.

She accused the authors of the oil ban of deliberately trying to catch her husband by getting his wife’s firm trapped in what would have become an illegal deal.

“The essence of the oil scandal is that we, citizens, have the right to do anything not forbidden by law,” she said. “They, [government] civil servants, have the right to do only that which is permitted by law.”

Mrs Zvarych is now suing Ukrainian newspaper Dzerkalo Tyzhnya for “publishing inaccurate information” and damaging her business reputation.

In the wake of the affair, Ms Tymoshenko and several other cabinet ministers issued an open letter to journalists, calling on them not to behave like “hired killers” by discrediting the new government and undermining its good intentions. The letter accused the media of using the leadership’s transparency and openness to foment political intrigue.

The newspaper Stolichnye Novosti spoke for most journalists in its response to the letter: “We have already been through the politics of political censorship and silencing the truth. We don’t want the same thing to happen again.”

Serhiy Goos, head of the Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine, said at a Kiev media conference: “The government now realises the letter was a mistake. It has received a hostile reaction from journalists.”

The broadcast media in Ukraine was crudely censored before journalists’ protests combined with November’s street demonstrations to overturn the system of state interference. One of the new government’s top priorities is to remove the officials responsible for implementing censorship and establish high editorial standards in news and current affairs.

So the National Television Company of Ukraine (NTKU) was initially singled out for a radical transformation into a public service broadcaster, its output to be monitored by a committee of MPs, journalists and public figures. With a general election looming next year, however, the government is beginning to see the advantages of having a state-owned broadcaster under its control.

“There are voices in the cabinet saying it’s not worth changing it before the elections,” said a source close to the government. “I don’t think the government is backing away theoretically from public service broadcasting, but practically they are.”

The new head of NTKU, Taras Stetskiv, is one of Mr Yushchenko’s trusted lieutenants who organised the “tent city” in Kiev during the November protests. He has said that public service broadcasting “won’t happen tomorrow” and that in the meantime he will concentrate on coverage of Ukraine’s hosting of the Eurovision Song Contest in May.

NTKU’s handling of Eurovision has also been criticised for slavishly toeing the government line – not unlike what the state broadcaster used to do under the previous regime.

When it seemed that the most audience votes would go to singer Ana Lorak, considered a supporter of the losing presidential candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, the new government stepped in at the last minute to impose a new contestant. The group Greenjolly wrote Together We Are Many, a pro-Yushchenko rap song that became the anthem of the Orange movement in November.

The song’s lyrics say: “Together, there are many of us. And we cannot be overcome. No falsifications! No lies! No machinations! Yes Yushchenko! Yes Yushchenko! This is our president! We are not cattle. We are not goats. We are Ukraine’s daughters and sons. Now or never. That’s enough waiting! Together, there are many of us. And we cannot be overcome!”

Greenjolly went on to win the Eurovision nomination. Ms Lorak claims that the vote was rigged, with callers unable to get through to the telephone voting lines.

The deputy prime minister, Mykola Tomenko, denied the competition was fixed. “Whatever path the participants took to the final, the final decision was made by viewers and only them,” the Times reported him saying.

The accusations facing Greenjolly mirror the problems facing the new government. According to a joke circulating in Kiev, the new interior minister Yuri Lutsenko gathers together his police chiefs to discuss sacking corrupt policemen. But the cops start to sing Greenjolly’s refrain: “Together we are many, we will not be overcome!”

At issue is whether the government succeeds in paying the piper, or will end up dancing to other tunes.

guardian.co.uk

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