Less nostalgia, more pain: scientists study 1763 Eurovision songs

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Ready for Eurovision

Get ready to have fun, whether you like it or not, as the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 approaches, the final of which takes place on Saturday May 16.

In good timing, the newspaper Royal Society Open Science published a major study on the history of Eurovision. The researchers compiled data on every contest from 1956 to 2024, a total of 1,763 songs. They then categorized the songs based on language used, themes and lyrics, as well as musical attributes such as genre. For part of this, they used AI tools, which Feedback can understand because the idea of ​​listening to 1,763 Eurovision entries caused our tympanic membranes to briefly fold in on themselves.

All sorts of things came out of this analysis. For example, a previous study identified 12 main themes describing the most popular songs, including longing, desire, breakup and pain. However, the Eurovision entries actually only use 11: “We excluded ‘Jaded’ because it appears in less than 5% of the songs,” the authors write. The comments make it seem like we could have told them that, because the gloriously nerdy sensibilities of the competition don’t really allow for anything as complicated as feeling jaded. But maybe that’s our own jadedness speaking.

One of the biggest declines is in songs expressing nostalgia, which clearly isn’t what it used to be. However, pain, rebellion, despair, confusion and escapism have become more prevalent. There was a significant increase in confusion and evasion in the 1970s, which researchers say was “a response to all the crises of the 1970s.” However, the pain only began to increase in the 2000s. “It may not be a coincidence that this is occurring after the Great Recession,” the authors write. However, despair remains quite rare. “This may be due to the emotional weight of a feeling such as despair, which could discourage voters,” they say. The comments can’t shake the feeling that all of this could be summed up concisely as “we don’t know.”

Over the decades, the songs became less acoustic and more electronic. They are mostly written in English, as opposed to the national languages ​​of the countries. And they tend to be pop, as opposed to any other musical genre, with high levels of “danceability.” “Participants are actively adjusting their entries to match the standards set by recent winners,” it seems.

Finally, there are some curious exceptions to these trends. France, Italy, Portugal and Spain have all resisted the temptation to use songs with English lyrics. Apparently, “paying a price to promote their own languages ​​is a rational choice in a geopolitical context that goes beyond winning elections.” [Eurovision].” Feedback always knew that Eurovision was part of the Great Game.

The researchers summarize all of this as “organizational-level learning at the level of organizers and participants.” Commenters think this means “people keep trying to enter the contest.”

Call for foam

In a previous article, Feedback described a park entirely filled with microscopic foraminifera sculptures and wondered if there were even more specialized science-themed tourist attractions. In particular, we wondered if there would not be “a museum dedicated solely to moss” (April 11).

Reader John Wilson wrote to tell us about the Serenity Moss Garden in North Carolina. The mosses cover approximately 900 square meters of mountainside and can be viewed from a trail. It’s not a museum, John says, “like an air-conditioned box with pillars and curators with no social skills” (ouch), but nonetheless “it’s a thing, for those who want it.”

Clearly, Feedback wasn’t ambitious enough in our quest for niche attractions. Can anyone find a stonefly (fly) museum or curated set of beach pebbles?

New new mathematics

Despite our workplace, Feedback still gets nervous about certain types of math. We intuitively know what it means to divide two fractions, but it actually requires a pencil and paper. As for converting by orders of magnitude, like changing square kilometers to square meters – phew.

Such nerves do not afflict Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary. He was criticized after claiming the price of a drug had fallen by 600 percent, which rival politicians pointed out was mathematically impossible.

The reactions are pretty sure that, in this case, RFK Jr.’s rivals are right, because if the price of a product drops 100 percent, that means it has fallen to zero, and that seems like a natural limit. We assume the company could start paying people to take the drug away from them, meaning the product would have a negative price. However, translating that into percentage change is something we’re happy to leave to mathematicians, and no pharmaceutical company does it anyway.

RFK Jr. found himself in this mathematical quagmire. “Well, if the drug cost $100 and it went to $600, that would be a 600 percent increase,” he said. “If the amount goes from $600 to $100, that’s a savings of 600 percent.”

We can only conclude that RFK Jr. invented a new type of logical reasoning. Unlike a syllogism, where the conclusion follows inevitably from the premise, this is an anti-syllogism where, despite a clearly correct premise, the conclusion is 100 percent false.

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