Post by Gregory (inactive) on Apr 7, 2019 8:49:39 GMT 1
In what’s becoming a trend for me, I like to sneak in and watch the Youtube-friendly Belorussian audition videos and see they've got rolled up their sleeves. Mostly I just wanted to see how much Daz Sampson would suck. Somewhere in the midst of those auditions was Zinaida Kupriyanovich, a.k.a. ZENA, and her song “Like It” was a decent modern pop song. I didn’t think much more about it, because while it was good, it wasn’t “great.”
Then I come to find out it won the national selection. Oops.
I didn’t know until I had to prepare this review that she co-hosted Junior Eurovision 2018. Because of this, many Belorussian viewers believe the selection was corrupt and that she won due to her money. Sound familiar? That’s because people claimed the same of Alekseev last year. Most videos of her live performance are pretty evenly matched with the like/dislike ratios, so she doesn’t have homeground support - a hot issue this year in quite a few countries.
That being said, it sounds to me like very dated pop; like something from five to ten years ago. The 2000’s guitar leads into some random lyrical content about phones, comfort zones, dum da-da-dum… Meh. By the time you get to the third chorus, you start wondering how many times she’s actually song “Is he gonna like it?”. The lyrical content of this song is pretty poor. Nothing deep or memorable - which may be its biggest weakness of all, because I do think Zena has a strong voice.
This is clearly meant to be nothing more than a Europop dance song, because the only fun I have is watching her move on stage, even when it’s not extremely natural. This probably still beats some of Belarus' older songs, but I don’t like this more than NAVI Band or even Ivan.
So I guess what I’m saying is … No, Zena, I’m not gonna like it. At least not more than most songs this year. With Semifinal 1 being so strong this year, Belarus will have to wish for some help from their neighborly friends.