3 Must-See Female Singers from the Eurovision 2010 Competition

The Eurovision competition is an annual celebration of European music in which different companies enter their winning pop songs to compete on an international field. The viewers vote on the songs to advance them into the next round, and voting also determines the overall winners. The contest is similar to American Idol, but the songs are originals written by artists in the country of origin. While Eurovision often has many quality acts, the music that gets to the finals is usually pure pop, and often from the largest countries.

Bergendahl brings it for Sweden

"This is My Life", sung by Anna Bergendahl, is a moving ballad with lyrics that sing of finding your own self and living your own life, even when those around you might try to get you to conform with the norm. Bergendahl has a beautiful voice, and the song, written by Bobby Ljunggren with lyrics by Kristian Lagerström, is a moving piece with inspirational lyrics.

It came out of Latvia

Though the grammar skills of the lyricist who wrote her song were lacking sorely in the English department, "What for," sung by Aisha, is a decent piece with a strong pop melody. With dubious lyrical lines like "I've asked my Uncle Joe, but he can't speak," and the clunky chorus lyric, "Only Mr. God knows why", Aisha still manages to give a halfway decent performance of a song with an okay melody, but it wasn't enough to advance her to win the contest. Don't blame her, though, she didn't write the lyrics. She seemed so nervous in the competition that her voice did not seem particularly strong, her backup singers were out of tune, and in general, Aisha's vocal range was too high for the song as it was performed. Overall, the song was okay and Aisha is a talented singer, but it just wasn't the right song for her and it didn't work out well in the end.

And the winner is...

Finally, in every competition, you must look at the winner. Well, the winner of Eurovision 2010 was a German artist named Lena with a song called "Satellite". Though Lena was not the worst of the female competitors in the Eurovision competition, her video and song were generally poor, the performance was disingenuous and there were several other artists with more performance and song quality who were bumped by Lena's apparent cutesy-cuteness. Though not the most exciting female performer, Lena is worth checking out, if only to see where pop music is in the present day.

So, like American Idol, the best man (or woman) does not always win. However, Eurovision inevitably yields a slew of amazing performers, if you pay attention to the ranks before the finals, so it is worthwhile to watch their competitions even if the end results are a tad bubblegum.