A Folk-Metal Goodbye to the Village

MAY 15 2024 · 12:15

Baby Lasagna · "Rim Tim Tagi Dim" · Croatia · 2024 Placement: 2nd · Language: English · Composers: Marko Purišić · Venue: Malmö Arena · Host: Malmö, Sweden · Type: upset · Broadcast: streaming On May 11, 2024, at the Malmö Arena, Marko Purišić — performing as Baby Lasagna — delivered 'Rim Tim Tagi Dim', one of the most unexpectedly accomplished Croatian Eurovision entries in the country's Eurovision history. The song, written by Purišić himself, fused folk-metal riffing and pounding percussion with an English-language lyric about a young Croatian leaving his home village for economic reasons, selling his cow and promising to return — a narrative deeply familiar in a country that had experienced significant post-EU-accession emigration. The staging featured Purišić in a short-sleeved white shirt and trousers with folk-pattern accents, surrounded by a small ensemble of dancers in coordinated rural-inflected costume, performing a choreography that alternated between stomping unison movement and moments of deliberate stillness. Vocally Purišić delivered a mix of sung, shouted and growled sections, and the song's 'rim tim tagi dim' refrain — an onomatopoeic folk-syllable chant — proved unusually memorable on first hearing. Croatia finished second overall, its best-ever Eurovision result, behind Switzerland's Nemo, and won the televote across much of Europe. Context Croatia had never previously finished higher than fourth at Eurovision — a position reached once, in the 1990s — and had spent much of the intervening decades either absent from the contest or placed mid-table. The 2024 contest itself was dominated by the political controversy around Israel's participation and the Joost Klein disqualification, giving the Croatian entry less of the pre-contest attention that often accrues to frontrunners. Economic emigration from Croatia to wealthier EU member states, particularly Germany and Ireland, had been a sustained national concern since the country's 2013 EU accession, and 'Rim Tim Tagi Dim' consciously addressed that social reality within a Eurovision-friendly pop-metal frame. Baby Lasagna had reached the Croatian national selection partly by accident, reportedly after another artist withdrew, making the Eurovision result all the more striking. Legacy The second-place finish surpassed Croatia's previous best and retrospectively recontextualised the country's Eurovision history as having consistently under-delivered on its musical capacity. 'Rim Tim Tagi Dim' became an immediate hit across Central and Eastern Europe, and Baby Lasagna emerged as a credible ongoing pop act rather than a one-off Eurovision entrant. The song's treatment of economic emigration was widely discussed in Croatian and wider European media as one of the more lyrically grounded Eurovision entries of recent years. Together with Käärijä's 2023 runner-up finish, it cemented a mid-2020s Eurovision moment in which folk-metal-adjacent, non-Swedish-pop entries consistently dominated the televote while narrowly losing to more conventional pop on combined scores. Mythology The song's title is sometimes explained as meaningful Croatian or a specific dialect phrase; Purišić has described it as essentially a nonsense folk refrain, chosen for its phonetic impact rather than its semantic content. The emigration theme is also occasionally overstated as explicitly anti-EU; the lyric is closer to personal loss than political critique.