Tiny Tim
27.02.2011, 22:45
translated from http://www.lenaisten.de/blog/ by pit, Economist, support4lena and many other fine forum members - thanks a lot to all of you!
Following three TV live shows on prime time, the immediate success of Lena's new album 'Good News', which conquered the top position in the charts right after its release and reached gold status after one week, so that tickets for her upcoming tour in April at Germany's nine biggest halls are becoming scarce, it is time to marvel at this remarkable coincidence of perfect acumen and breathtaking fortune that turned – within only a year – a very attractive, very sprightly student with unspecific artistic ambitions into an almost established singing artist with a perspective to become a super star. To evaluate how this rapid development differs from the usual casting starlet career we have to take a look back.
Late in the night of February 2nd 2010, a certain Lena Meyer-Landrut, student of a comprehensive school, 18 years old, almost without any pertinent experience, appeared on the stage of a TV studio in Köln-Mülheim, where a TV show was being produced that was hardly apt to draw the rapt attention of the audience. The aim of this show in eight episodes could hardly be more dismal: To find a German contestant for the trashiest and yet biggest music spectacle in the world, the Eurovision Song Contest. After embarrassing performances and well deserved low rankings in recent years, this prospect didn't promise great reward either for the audience or for the candidates; only the involvement of Stefan Raab, who – alternatively as performer and as song-writer – had been good for a fifth, seventh and eighth place in the past, may have comforted to some extent. Accordingly, the show started off innocuously and unspectacularly without any highlight worth mentioning.
That is, until the above-quoted Lena Meyer-Landrut entered the stage as the tenth and last candidate. It can still be reconstructed in respective internet forums to the point of the exact moment that a sheer explosion of consciousness took place in that part of the audience that was still awake at the time when she began to perform Adele's 'My Same'. The video of this performance that was provided later on the show's web page was viewed more than 1.6 million times, which is more than ten times as often as the most popular act of any other candidate. The jurors skipped any detailed criticism, instead becoming very fundamental and making use of superlatives that culminated in the sentence “You have got star appeal, people will love you!“ Unanimously, all three of them proclaimed Lena as their favourite.
Lena's stunned reaction confirmed what she expressed later on again and again: She had neither anticipated nor intended such a success; she had not even thought it was possible at all. Not even the participation in this first show was on her mind when she, taken by a sudden whim, applied for Our Star for Oslo in autumn 2009 – originally she had intended to order tickets for another Stefan Raab show (TV Total). Singing without any accompaniment in an artless casting box she simply wanted to hear the opinion of entertainment professionals whether she could sing and was appealing. The huge discrepancy between this movingly simple motivation and an overwhelmed and concurrently overwhelming reaction that Lena faced probably became most apparent in her appearance at the NDR Talk Show of May 7th 2010, the day her debut album 'My Cassette Player' was released. The videos that can still be watched in various versions on You Tube show a group of middle-aged, mediocre professionals who nevertheless have been firmly installed in the German show circus for years. They gently flatter the pupil that she still was at the time with an enthusiastic felicity as if she was the Virgin Mary herself.
This perception remained and was reinforced in the course of time. In a hitherto unknown frequency and constancy the attribute “enamoured“ became a ubiquitous description especially of (and by) German journalists whenever Lena was mentioned. (The stubborn malice and unhumorous search for flaws which those very same people in the German media currently show towards Lena is perhaps an expression of an inhibited sense of shame about the enthusiasm they had displayed a year ago and that they would now like to make forgotten - like the honest citizens of Grasse who wanted to make forgotten their frenzy of love caused by the perfume of Grenouille, the main protagonist of Patrick Süskind's famous novel, only minutes after they had wanted to see this murderer being put to death under the blows of the hangman.) Lena herself, in fact, remained virtually untouched by all these declarations of love. “Don't believe the hype“, singer and juror Adel Tawil had advised her for life, and Lena adhered to it. Her seemingly (or should I say: obviously) still intact mind shows that she was well advised. She couldn't care less, and does well to do so, that the former fools in love are holding this against her as arrogance.
Lena wanted to become an artist, now she has become one and she is very successful. This sentence is right and wrong at the same time because something decisive is missing: i.e. the moment of that mad coincidence that made her click on the banner ad of Our Star for Oslo one day in autumn 2009. Had she not done so, she would have followed her original plans: work & travel in Australia, applying for drama school, and then seeing what comes up. The TV show Our Star for Oslo would have taken place without her, with brave talented candidates, an audience ready to be amused, a winner with the prospect of, say, a ninth place in Oslo, and the whole thing would have become part of the German amusement business without leaving any memorable traces. Perhaps even a new Max Mutzke or Stefanie Heinzmann would have emerged. And nobody would have missed anything.
One shudders at the thought...
Following three TV live shows on prime time, the immediate success of Lena's new album 'Good News', which conquered the top position in the charts right after its release and reached gold status after one week, so that tickets for her upcoming tour in April at Germany's nine biggest halls are becoming scarce, it is time to marvel at this remarkable coincidence of perfect acumen and breathtaking fortune that turned – within only a year – a very attractive, very sprightly student with unspecific artistic ambitions into an almost established singing artist with a perspective to become a super star. To evaluate how this rapid development differs from the usual casting starlet career we have to take a look back.
Late in the night of February 2nd 2010, a certain Lena Meyer-Landrut, student of a comprehensive school, 18 years old, almost without any pertinent experience, appeared on the stage of a TV studio in Köln-Mülheim, where a TV show was being produced that was hardly apt to draw the rapt attention of the audience. The aim of this show in eight episodes could hardly be more dismal: To find a German contestant for the trashiest and yet biggest music spectacle in the world, the Eurovision Song Contest. After embarrassing performances and well deserved low rankings in recent years, this prospect didn't promise great reward either for the audience or for the candidates; only the involvement of Stefan Raab, who – alternatively as performer and as song-writer – had been good for a fifth, seventh and eighth place in the past, may have comforted to some extent. Accordingly, the show started off innocuously and unspectacularly without any highlight worth mentioning.
That is, until the above-quoted Lena Meyer-Landrut entered the stage as the tenth and last candidate. It can still be reconstructed in respective internet forums to the point of the exact moment that a sheer explosion of consciousness took place in that part of the audience that was still awake at the time when she began to perform Adele's 'My Same'. The video of this performance that was provided later on the show's web page was viewed more than 1.6 million times, which is more than ten times as often as the most popular act of any other candidate. The jurors skipped any detailed criticism, instead becoming very fundamental and making use of superlatives that culminated in the sentence “You have got star appeal, people will love you!“ Unanimously, all three of them proclaimed Lena as their favourite.
Lena's stunned reaction confirmed what she expressed later on again and again: She had neither anticipated nor intended such a success; she had not even thought it was possible at all. Not even the participation in this first show was on her mind when she, taken by a sudden whim, applied for Our Star for Oslo in autumn 2009 – originally she had intended to order tickets for another Stefan Raab show (TV Total). Singing without any accompaniment in an artless casting box she simply wanted to hear the opinion of entertainment professionals whether she could sing and was appealing. The huge discrepancy between this movingly simple motivation and an overwhelmed and concurrently overwhelming reaction that Lena faced probably became most apparent in her appearance at the NDR Talk Show of May 7th 2010, the day her debut album 'My Cassette Player' was released. The videos that can still be watched in various versions on You Tube show a group of middle-aged, mediocre professionals who nevertheless have been firmly installed in the German show circus for years. They gently flatter the pupil that she still was at the time with an enthusiastic felicity as if she was the Virgin Mary herself.
This perception remained and was reinforced in the course of time. In a hitherto unknown frequency and constancy the attribute “enamoured“ became a ubiquitous description especially of (and by) German journalists whenever Lena was mentioned. (The stubborn malice and unhumorous search for flaws which those very same people in the German media currently show towards Lena is perhaps an expression of an inhibited sense of shame about the enthusiasm they had displayed a year ago and that they would now like to make forgotten - like the honest citizens of Grasse who wanted to make forgotten their frenzy of love caused by the perfume of Grenouille, the main protagonist of Patrick Süskind's famous novel, only minutes after they had wanted to see this murderer being put to death under the blows of the hangman.) Lena herself, in fact, remained virtually untouched by all these declarations of love. “Don't believe the hype“, singer and juror Adel Tawil had advised her for life, and Lena adhered to it. Her seemingly (or should I say: obviously) still intact mind shows that she was well advised. She couldn't care less, and does well to do so, that the former fools in love are holding this against her as arrogance.
Lena wanted to become an artist, now she has become one and she is very successful. This sentence is right and wrong at the same time because something decisive is missing: i.e. the moment of that mad coincidence that made her click on the banner ad of Our Star for Oslo one day in autumn 2009. Had she not done so, she would have followed her original plans: work & travel in Australia, applying for drama school, and then seeing what comes up. The TV show Our Star for Oslo would have taken place without her, with brave talented candidates, an audience ready to be amused, a winner with the prospect of, say, a ninth place in Oslo, and the whole thing would have become part of the German amusement business without leaving any memorable traces. Perhaps even a new Max Mutzke or Stefanie Heinzmann would have emerged. And nobody would have missed anything.
One shudders at the thought...