Re: ????????? - Israel 2010 - Harel Ska'at - Milim
What you are saying is true, Vedenneito, but even if what Skaat said was printed accurately and no matter how he meant it, I don't see it being that big a deal.
I don't recall Kavanaugh missing a note that noticeably. I would have to dock her a few points then. An analysis of the singers reported that she only hit about 10 bad notes during her song, which was one of the best of all the countries (Skaat was off around 22 times and Lena something like 67 by comparison).
That's just it, there weren't any great entries (where the song, the singing and the presentation were all extraordinary). One country that was pretty good on all three areas was France, but I think the performance lasted just over 2 minutes; Greece wasn't bad either. I guess Turkey gave a strong performance and the singing wasn't bad for rock, but the song was hardly "Tumblng Dice" (so great performance of a mediocre song I guess). Speaking of Dice, his song was charming and easy to cheer for, but the guy's vocal tics reminded me so much of the wanna be male singers on American Idol, all trying to channel whoever the sensitive singer-songwriter de jour is now (James Blunt, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, etc.) that it became tiresome after 30 seconds or so.
Israel rated high on my score card even with the missed notes, the presentation problems, and the lack of typical smoothness in Skaat's voice because even with all that he still did some things extremely well, things that no other singer could match like singing words with such powerful emotions--listen to how he sings "bagaron" and you don't need to understand what that means to feel the pain, the sense of someone wanting to hold on to something lost. No other singer I heard did anything remotely like that. Kavanaugh was also good at turning a phrase, but not as good at endowing specific words with this kind of expressive quality. So while other singers lost points for every line they struggled through in bad English, Skaat piled on points for each line of emotional singing. That's how Israel rated as high as 3 or 4 on my scorecard (which meant I would have given Israel a 9 or 8 if I was a member of the jury).
Other people may have been looking for other things, but I just don't see how someone could objectively rate Israel out of the top 10 even with all the problems I mentioned. I read some comments where people said they liked "Milim" but expressed disappointment about Skaat's poor performance at the finals (a sentiment that I obviously don't share), and I am thinking, well go watch his KDAM performance on youtube if you think that way because if you like the song, I don't think there's a singer alive who could have performed the song better at least on that day.