Lena - A breath of fresh air for the European Song Contest

Abstract or Introduction

“Love, oh love...” has already been in everyone’s head in Germany for weeks, now it’s also in the head of all the 125 million viewers of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) 2010 in Oslo. Even children of the age of eight to ten can sing the chorus of Lena Meyer-Landrut’s song “Satellite” by heart. For 28 years, nobody has won the Grand Prix Eurovision for Germany, but this time Lena did it. Germany and a big part of Europe have gone “Lena-crazy”.
The German candidate won the European championship in singing – how Stefan Raab called it – with the second largest margin in the history of the ESC, even though she was not even one of the favorites right from the start. She convinced so many people with her voice and her performance that she got 246 out of 480 points. From nine European countries she even got the perfect score of 12 points. That’s really a huge progress for Germany in this competition, since the last 27 years have not been crowned by success of the German contestants. You only have to remember the No Angels with their 23rd place and the more than embarrassing striptease of Dita van Teese in 2009. What a shame!
Even if Lena’s weird Australian English accent leaves much to be desired, she obviously persuaded many people to vote for her. But what exactly lead to the fact that Lena orbits so many European TV viewers ‘like a satellite’ so that they called or text-messaged for her, the dainty German high-school graduate?
Lena is just a cutie without too much of anything. She is handsome and pretty, but also a little bit boyish. In her own sweet and crazy way, she has been taken into her fan’s hearts immediately. And her fans are not just young girls and teenagers – as it is usual, when somebody moves up the pop music ladder as fast as she did.