With “The Code” Nemo celebrated what makes pop music special in a glittering way – and won the Eurovision Song Contest. Unfortunately, the singer hasn’t come up with anything new for his current single.
Nemo shone with “The Code”, but not with “Eurostar”. Image: At the opening of the Zurich Film Festival, 2024.
Til Buergy / EPA
He called his song “The Code” with which he won the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö. He had deciphered the code, he shouted, sang, panted and rejoiced. What was meant was the code of himself. His identity and sexualities. His fluid personality, which enchanted 25-year-old Nemo Mettler from Biel into an elf from a mythical lake.
The song celebrated in a glittering way what makes pop music special: combining the affirming with the surprising and making it sound as if it had just been created. Pop is present to sing.
After Nemo had enchanted everyone with his speech, appearance and androgynous charm, he irritated people in interviews with his loudness. Given the public’s glaring interest in him, he reacted offended to any question that sought to confirm more than the cotton candy of his wokeness. A paranoid narcissus temporarily emerged behind the singing prince.
Wish fulfillment, but immediately
His fans were all the more excited about the talented man’s new single. Now it has appeared, it is called “Eurostar”. Like the French express train. And of course also how Nemo sees himself. A song of movement – and confirmation.
It starts with a powerful chorus that calls for the pleasure principle right from the start, the fulfillment of wishes without delay: “Meet me in the lobby, I’ve been up for twenty-four. I want to dance, I want to party, do it like no one before.
This may not be Rilke, but it is clear, and clarity is more important in this genre than subordinate clauses. Meet me down at the hotel, I’ve been awake for 24 hours. I want to dance, I want to party like never before. In the video you can see Nemo lying on the bed, stretched out like a young Freddie Mercury.
The force of the opening is followed by a change in the song that is so unexpectedly typical of Nemo. A techno beat now drives the singer, who demonstrates through singing what he and the technology can do with his voice. From now on, anything is possible, the song tells us, another change of style, another character trait, a new psychological wardrobe. Nemo did it brilliantly on “The Code”, and you expect this constant unexpectedness again.
Unfortunately, the singer and co-author Lasse Midtsian Nymann don’t seem to have come up with anything new, because the song repeats its pattern several times and, due to a lack of further ideas, comes to an end after just two and a half minutes. You couldn’t be happier. Even though the singer claims to celebrate bliss for 24 hours, we know that’s a lie. Only the misfortune continues.
Fast forward culture
So disappointment arises after the Eurostar stops. Perhaps this is unavoidable because Nemo’s music remains so reliant on quick stimuli. And the music collapses when these stimuli are absent. As a child of Tiktok culture, this narrative form of fast forwarding, acceleration and shortening, excitement through sensory overload, the musician knows full well that the audience quickly gets bored. And boredom is the only unforgivable sin in pop.
Nemo’s songs are basically montages, coupled song fragments. The tiktokization of the music takes place in the song itself; it is its own acceleration program. And Nemo rushes through his music like a driven man, filled with the greatest fear there is in this Tiktok world – the fear of being clicked away.
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