Song Of The Day 5/21/2015: Anti-Social Media – “The Way You Are” (Denmark)

I'm Ovision -- Eurovision! 2015: It occurs to me I haven’t yet explained how this whole Eurovision Song Contest thing works. First off, a bunch of people write songs. They somehow present them to officials in their home country who handle Eurovision affairs. Then all the countries pick what song they’re going to send, kind of like what happens with the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. They have their own voting panels. It’s adorable. Then, when it’s time to start the contest for reals, they have two semi-final rounds to whittle contenders down to the final round. Lastly, in an orgiastic explosion of glitter, fog machines and the will to live, they hold the finals on the weekend and decide who wrote the best song in European history this year.

The first round of semi-finals in the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest is over with, and I’m sorry to say a couple of my favorites have been sent home. I had, like, four or five Eurovision songs that I even legitimately liked, so almost half of them have already been eliminated. Denmark’s Anti-Social Media – I’ll give you a few seconds here to groan about that unfortunate name – is one of them, cast into the lake of styrofoam never to serenade us again. Shame. This video, as discussed in my companion piece in The Stranger about the ESC, officially launches the era of nostalgia for Tom Hanks’ directorial debut That Thing You Do! (exclamation point theirs). A good ole-fashioned Herman’s Hermits romp accompanied by monochrome visuals and foot-stomping breeziness.

I plan on covering this song in my new band, Megabyte Tilly. I mean Heaven’s Gateway. I mean Captcha-Cha-Cha. I mean C+/C+ Music Factory. I mean Chariots of Firewall. Oh, bands of the future, please never leave yourself open like this.