Drip Drop: The Setup for Azerbaijan's 2011 Breakthrough

MAY 15 2010 · 12:30

Safura · "Drip Drop" · Azerbaijan · 2010 Placement: 5th · Score: 145 · Language: English · Composers: Anders Bagge, Stefan Örn, Piotr Wass, Sandra Bjurman · Venue: Telenor Arena · Host: Oslo, Norway · Type: performance innovation · Broadcast: HD On May 29, 2010, at the Telenor Arena outside Oslo — Norway's football-stadium Eurovision built around Alexander Rybak's 2009 victory — the seventeen-year-old Azerbaijani singer Safura Alizade performed 'Drip Drop' in the third Eurovision entry of Azerbaijan's short contest history. The song had been written by a Swedish-Polish team, working for the Azerbaijani state broadcaster İTV under an explicit mandate to produce a contest-ready R&B ballad. The staging was heavily engineered: a circular rotating platform, Safura in a long floor-dragging dress built for choreographed motion, a rain-motif backdrop that literalised the song's drip-drop chorus. Azerbaijan finished fifth with 145 points — the country's best Eurovision result at that stage. One year later, Ell & Nikki would take exactly this template to victory with 'Running Scared', giving Azerbaijan its first Eurovision win and its 2012 Baku host edition. Context Azerbaijan's state broadcaster İTV had adopted an explicit strategy of hiring foreign — primarily Swedish — songwriting and production teams to build Eurovision entries. The Stefan Örn–Sandra Bjurman writing partnership, which produced both 'Drip Drop' and the following year's 'Running Scared', would come to typify the Eurovision subgenre now sometimes called the 'Azerbaijan ballad'. Legacy 'Drip Drop' is now remembered primarily as the structural setup for Ell & Nikki's 2011 Azerbaijani victory. Azerbaijan's 2012 Baku host edition was widely seen as the climax of the country's concentrated Eurovision investment; the Safura 2010 result was its first clearly successful data point. Mythology Safura's 2010 is sometimes remembered as an Azerbaijani victory; it finished fifth.