Winner of Eurovision Song Contest: The Big Profile – Nemo’s Triumph!

Nemo wins this year’s Eurovision for Switzerland. The song challenges the dogma of the gender binary and was a win before that. For us all.

Christof Gertsch(Das Magazin), Lucy Jones (Translation)

Publiziert: 09.05.2024, 13:20

5

Nemo – full name Nemo Mettler, a non-binary twenty-four-year-old from Biel – is representing Switzerland in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. As the contest is bigger than the Super Bowl and the Oscars, and second only to the World Cup final in terms of global televised events, you might already know this. 150 million viewers are expected to tune in next week for the semi-finals on Tuesday and Thursday, and on Saturday for the final from Malmö in Sweden, who were last year’s winners.

The title of Nemo’s song is ‘The Code’ and lasts three minutes, which is the maximum length a Eurovision song is allowed to be. But those three minutes pack a punch. It’s hard to believe, in fact, how much is packed into them.

Candid self-discovery

When you hear the song for the first time, its quick succession of rhythm and style changes might confuse you. High-speed rap overlaps with falsetto swells, opera and pop passages quickly segue into drum ‘n’ bass, and just when you think you hear a trace of Freddie Mercury, it’s gone again. But ‘The Code’ isn’t just a song to listen to. To take in all the transformations Nemo goes through in voice and looks, I recommend watching the music video.

Before reading on, see for yourself, on YouTube, for example.

And how do you feel now?

My reaction when I first watched the video was to immediately want to get to know the person behind the song, this playful performer who tells the story of their self-discovery so candidly.

The chorus goes like this:

I went to hell and back

To find myself on track

I broke the code

Like ammonites

I just gave it some time

Now I found paradise

I broke the code

And the bridge:

Somewhere between the 0s and 1s

That’s where I found my kingdom come

Nemo has to postpone our first meeting, after which it’s difficult to find an alternative time. When we finally fix a date on a Monday evening at the end of March, my phone rings at 8 pm – when I’m sitting in the restaurant in central Lausanne where we arranged to meet. On the other end, it’s Nemo who says, ‘Oh crikey, I’m so sorry! I think I’ve left my suitcase on the train.’ There’s a short pause. ‘I’m back on the train now.’ Then a longer break. ‘No, it’s not here . . . But now the train’s moving off.’ Silence. ‘I’ll get off in Morges and take the next train back. So-rry!’

Because Nemo then has to check into the hotel where the following day’s appointments with the Swiss media will take place, I suggest we meet in the hotel restaurant, which Nemo gratefully agrees to. Hours later, when the waiter waves the dessert menu at us impatiently for a second time, Nemo still hasn’t touched half the main course. There’s just so much! to! talk about!

Leaving the suitcase on the train was especially frustrating. Since leaving home eight years ago, Nemo’s life has been a whirlwind, flitting between Bern, Zurich, Berlin, Los Angeles and Berlin again, sleeping on friends’ couches. Nemo’s suitcase, which doesn’t show up in the next few days despite lodging a search request with Swiss Rail, contains everything Nemo needed for the weeks leading up to Eurovision, the stage choreography in Gothenburg and the Eurovision pre-parties in Madrid, Amsterdam and Stockholm.

After one live performance, ‘The Code’ leapt to No. 1

Pre-parties are the warm-up for the Eurovision. They take place all over Europe, giving fans a chance to get to know the songs, and the artists a chance to rehearse in front of a live audience. Pre-parties are important, but not that important. Unless they build their own momentum, like this year. A few days after its release in mid-March, ‘The Code’ was placed between third and tenth in the bookie’s rankings of the Eurovision. But then, one live performance in Madrid at the beginning of April changed all that: Nemo was suddenly all over social media in Europe and ‘The Code’ jumped to number one. Since then, the song has remained at the top spot, with an ever-increasing lead and millions of listeners worldwide. This week, Nemo was temporarily knocked off the top spot by the Croatian contender.

To avoid disappointment, I won’t predict here that Eurovision victory is safe in Nemo’s hands. But if the bookies’ forecasts are anything to go by, it’s a pretty safe bet. Over the last ten years, they correctly predicted the winner six times.

The challenges of recording a successful Eurovision song are complex and lead to a key issue in marketing: Why do we like what we like? Ancient philosophers were the first to debate the ideal shape for objects. Later, the golden mean described the perfect middle ground between two extremes. Yet a glance at art through the ages shows that we find perfection boring and like things to be switched up, shifted, or something new to be added. But this new ‘something’ shouldn’t tax us or alienate us too much. It should be different but recognizable. We prefer surprises that carry some familiarity.

A Eurovision song has to work across cultures

Perhaps the most famous Eurovision song ever written is ‘Waterloo’ by Abba, which won in 1974. You could say that no band fits the Eurovision Song Contest better than Abba. The band’s image was happy, peaceful and relatable. But no one can copy them – Abba were one of a kind. A good Eurovision song has to be cheesy, of course – and ‘Waterloo’ is as cheesy as it gets. But it’s not generic. It’s pop music in its purest form: easy to get into but more sophisticated to produce than it seems.

Firstly, a good Eurovision song must work across cultures. It should function in a pub in Newcastle as well as a club in Riga. Secondly, it has to sound believable, meaning that the song’s message and the performer have to match. Thirdly, the song has to make us want to sing along as well as feel that we’re hearing something new.

‘The Code’ ticks all of these boxes.

When I tell people who know Nemo about the suitcase incident, they all react in the same amused way. No one seems at all worried. Nemo has a reputation for being sweet and sometimes scatty, but things generally turn out right in the end. There were only two things Nemo needed for the run-up to the Eurovision, both of which were fortunately in their hand luggage: pre-party stage costumes and a laptop for music sessions at night in their hotel room. Nemo lays down beats, composes lyrics and hums tunes under the duvet which serves as a makeshift sound studio. Nemo says: ‘When I’m on the road, there’s only one thing I miss – making music.’

How did Nemo become Nemo?

Nemo took violin lessons at age three, played drums at age eight, and performed in musicals at age thirteen. When Nemo was fifteen, Nemo participated in the Swiss equivalent of BGT – ‘Switzerland’s Got Talent’. With just these bare facts, Nemo sounds like a young prodigy fuelled by parental ambition. But Nemo never had to be forced to perform, nor were they especially determined or ambitious. Nemo always had a thousand ideas that they wanted to try out. That was the driving force. Nemo played music out on the streets, and when someone came to visit, Nemo performed their latest songs without prompting. Everyone could see that Nemo was drawn to the stage. But few would have predicted a major singing career: their voice range was almost unusually high – almost squeaky – until it broke.

Nemo and their younger sister Ella grew up between their parents’ home and a three-story office building in the centre of Biel, where their parents’ company BrainStore was based until it went bankrupt in 2011. BrainStore was an idea factory that sold innovation, and some of Switzerland’s most creative minds were behind it. A bathtub with piranhas greeted visitors in the foyer and there was a self-playing grand piano where Nemo sat, pretending to be a child prodigy whenever new people were around. BrainStore promised adventure and the space was full of wild energy, but it also involved hard work. When Nemo was born in August 1999, a crib was set up in the workspace.

Hands-off parenting, music not football

Nemo’s name is Nemo because their parents liked what it meant in Latin: no one. If you are no one, you can become someone, anyone – that was the idea.

‘Though it might not seem that way, my parents weren’t particularly pushy,’ says Nemo. ‘I don’t think we were either,’ says Nadja Schnetzler, Nemo’s mother, when I talk to her on the phone a few days after interviewing Nemo in Lausanne. ‘I’ve always been a hands-off kind of parent. I asked myself: What do my children need from me and where am I dispensable?’ She thinks for a minute, then adds, ‘But I was happy when Nemo got into music and not football.’ As the daughter of a church musician and music school director, she once dreamed of a singing career herself, but then decided against it. She was worried that it would not pay her enough to live on.

But Nemo never gave a thought to such things. Nemo just got on with it. They released their first songs at age fifteen and dropped out of a chef training course before it had even started. Or rather, a day before it started. ‘Give me a year,’ Nemo said. Nemo’s parents agreed and joined their child to break the news to the course instructor, who said, ‘I don’t want to stand in your way, but do you really think you’re doing the right thing?’ He was the head chef at Residenz Au Lac, a retirement home in Biel: a better place for a training course would be hard to find.

When Nemo invited the instructor to a concert two years later, he said, ‘You made the right decision.’

Just two years after abandoning a sensible career path, Nemo became one of the most sought-after people in the Swiss music industry.

Nemo never pretended from the start

It all started with a performance on Bounce Cypher, a live broadcast by the radio station SRF Virus, and an annual rap gathering in Zurich. Unlike in the USA, Swiss rap isn’t mainstream but is still part of youth culture. Bounce Cypher is one of the few chances for rappers to present themselves to a wider audience. Lyrics can be political, personal or otherwise, but they can’t have been performed anywhere else. It’s a lyrical showdown that’s not quite as competitive as American rap battles, in which singers try to defame their opponent as creatively as possible while talking themselves up to be bigger, stronger and better. Even so, some rappers, especially newcomers, are intimidated by Bounce Cypher because of its comparative nature.

But not Nemo. Nemo was sixteen and a complete unknown on the scene: they were also smaller than the others, not as cool and still wearing teeth braces. But the video of Nemo’s performance in 2016 is one of the most watched in the history of the Bounce Cypher. Even if you’re not a rap aficionado, the footage leaves you in no doubt about how good Nemo is, as well as imaginative, creative and tech-savvy. And you can tell by the looks of others standing around – major Swiss rappers like Nativ, Greis and Leduc – that they can’t believe what they’re hearing.

What made it special was that Nemo was being Nemo. There was no posing or bluffing, and nothing boastful about Nemo’s rap. Nemo was sixteen and not ashamed of it. This was no ‘ghetto kid,’ but a middle-class teen who probably wouldn’t fall too hard if a music career didn’t work out.

One of the people at the radio station event back then was Luc Oggier, who has since become a close friend of Nemo’s. He’s one half of the rap duo Lo & Leduc, whose 2018 overhit ‘079’ topped the Swiss singles charts for longer than any previous song.

At the time, people said that Nemo was copying Oggier, and this even became a debate on the Swiss youth channel Joiz. Perhaps it wasn’t a big deal and only interested a tiny group of people in the Swiss rap scene, but for a young kid looking to get into the music industry, it could have thrown a wrench in the works. Oggier sensed this. ‘It wasn’t difficult to see that Nemo’s music came from a personal place. Nemo wasn’t copying me at all. Whatever was in there came bubbling up to the surface, just naturally and freely. You could feel that it was just the beginning,’ he says.

He got hold of Nemo’s number and wrote a text message. Nemo says today, ‘It’s easy to forget when you’re older and more established but his encouragement was crucial for me back then. I wasn’t sure if my music was any good. But when Luc contacted me, it gave me confidence.’

Experiments and innovation

Many see the process differently. Especially older men tend to think that being harsh on young people doesn’t do them any harm, that they have to toughen up and sometimes get it in the neck. But Nemo’s story shows that people develop their potential even when – or perhaps especially when – they are not cut down to size but embraced by supportive, well-intentioned people. That’s the case with Nemo too. Nemo isn’t distrustful or resentful towards their competition, although these things are commonplace in show business. Nemo is friendly and attentive.

This is also true of the music manager whom Nemo turned to after Bounce Cypher, Zurich-based Martin Geisser. His independent label Bakara is run as humanely as possible, without exploitative contracts or clauses designed to trip musicians up. Zurich producer Dominik Jud, aka Dodo, is also on board, a Swiss musician known for his upbeat music. Dodo is not a pessimist, not in his own songs (his better-known tracks have titles such as ‘Robinsong’ and ‘Hippie Bus’) or in the music he arranges for others.

Since their collaboration started, Nemo has written almost three hundred songs, singing on some tracks, but increasingly writing for others. This creative output is immense especially as around sixty of those songs have also been released. To date, though, no album has been released. The idea of developing a concept that includes twelve to fourteen songs has not appealed to Nemo so far.

In this respect, Nemo hasn’t changed the way Nemo was as a child: someone who experiments and innovates, and is bursting with ideas. Nemo’s versatility and urgency have served them well. But they were also Nemo’s undoing.

A rapping child prodigy

At first, Nemo’s fame grew. At the age of eighteen – two years after Bounce Cypher – Nemo received four prizes at the Swiss Music Awards, more at one time than anyone has ever done: Best Male Solo Act, Best Breaking Act, Best Live Act and Best Hit. Nemo’s song ‘Du’ was constantly played on the radio.

The Swiss Music Awards were Nemo’s breakthrough. But they were also the occasion when Nemo’s public image was established: a child prodigy who rapped in Swiss dialect. ‘Suddenly, Nemo opened up a new category,’ recalls Luc Oggier. ‘And as Nemo evolved, the audience didn’t follow.’

In Oggier’s opinion, ‘Crush uf di’ and ‘5i uf de Uhr’ are two of the best songs ever written in Swiss dialect. Nemo also sang in English, developed a head voice, and wrote indie, jazz and pop songs. But no one was listening anymore. ‘Du’ had been played millions of times on YouTube and Spotify, but soon Nemo’s other songs were getting ten thousand clicks at most.

Nemo kept going, risking new things, increasing the number of beats, and feeling ready to take on the world. But the world didn’t seem ready for Nemo.

Oggier says, ‘In our circle of friends, we were sure that Nemo would write a global hit eventually. But we thought someone else might sing it. Nemo was no longer just a category; Nemo was an entire league. And perhaps all that agility and virtuosity made Nemo hard to get a handle on.’

‘The Code’ and its way out into the world

And then in spring of 2024, Nemo released ‘The Code’, a song which had been written in one day a year earlier. Nemo sang the vocals. It was as if everything Nemo had learned over the years, and had been building up inside during Nemo’s time away from the public eye, was just waiting to find a way out. Out into the world.

And finally, the world was now ready.

‘The Code’ might be Nemo’s song. But it was developed and written by a team. This may sound like a small detail because, after all, ‘The Code’ tells Nemo’s story, and Nemo is the person who performs the song on stage. But that small detail is arguably the core of the song.

To understand how this came about, we need to take a brief dive into the history of the Eurovision Song Contest.

At the heart of the Eurovision lies probably the purest wish of all: for peace to reign between the people of the world (or at least Europe). The first Eurovision was held in 1956 at the Teatro Kursaal in Lugano, eleven years after the end of World War II, and its goal was to bring European countries together in a conciliatory competition. Today, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), an association of 68 broadcasters from 56 countries, still organizes the contest. The bigger Europe has become over the decades, the bigger the EBU and the ESC have become too, a development accentuated by the fact that the ‘Euro’ in the Eurovision Song Contest has never been taken too seriously. Turkey, Morocco and Azerbaijan have also participated in the Eurovision, and since Australia was admitted in 2015, it has participated every year.

Its size, but perhaps more importantly, its political aspect is best illustrated by the fact that Vladimir Putin felt compelled to launch a counter-event this year. So far, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, China and Uzbekistan have expressed ‘interest’ in participating.

I read this in The European Review of Books, a magazine known for its highbrow content, which only goes to show that not even sophisticated cultural outlets can avoid the Eurovision nowadays. However, the article wasn’t about who might win the Eurovision, but about how often the small Baltic state of Lithuania has lost in thirty years of participating.

Switzerland has already won twice, including the first contest in Lugano with Lys Assia. However, its last win was thirty-six years ago when Lithuania was part of the EU. Back then, Céline Dion represented Switzerland, a Canadian, which might make you believe that the Eurovision doesn’t take the issue of nationality too seriously either. But you’d be wrong. The Eurovision may be a competition based on the idea of peace between peoples, but it’s a competition nonetheless – between countries. It stirs feelings in television audiences normally reserved for sports competitions. Céline Dion’s victory for Switzerland in 1988 and the commentator back then wasn’t a music journalist: It was Beni Thurnheer, Switzerland’s famous TV sports reporter.

Part social media event, part sports competition

Sven Epiney has ushered Switzerland through two semi-finals and a final since 2008 and, he tells me, he’s been a Eurovision fan for as long as he can remember. Epiney is fifty-two, a good thirty years older than Nemo, and he can remember a time when a television broadcaster was still called . . . a television broadcaster. But that’s not my point. Epiney lived through the heyday of television, a time when Swiss families all gathered in the living room for a ski race on a Saturday afternoon and a television show on a Saturday evening. The Eurovision was just such an occasion. In the 1990s, when the songs got louder, the programme lost relevance and the contest threatened to vanish into obscurity.

Its redemption came from an unexpected quarter. Private TV stations started launching casting shows, and audience interest in music competitions picked up again, which benefited the Eurovision. Today, in addition to sports competitions, the Eurovision is one of the last remaining live events that people watch on TV.

There are two reasons for this. First of all, the Eurovision is part sports competition. It thrives on its live element because no one wants to watch a music competition where the audience can vote for the winners and losers when it’s over. Secondly, it’s hard to imagine a more social-media-friendly show. The range of songs, glamorous performers, glittering visuals and dazzling audio material provide an almost inexhaustible stream of posts.

The Eurovision has achieved a rare thing. It’s a dusty brand that’s reinvented itself without renouncing its original character. The Eurovision itself has become what makes a good Eurovision song: familiar yet different, nostalgic yet avant-garde. ‘When you see how many countries, cultures and attitudes come together every year,’ says Sven Epiney, ‘you could say that, apart from occasional blips, it’s a very peaceful occasion.’

Without Pele Loriano, ‘The Code’ would not exist

Two years after Epiney’s premiere as a television commentator, music producer Pele Loriano became involved in the Eurovision. He’s the man without whom Nemo’s ‘The Code’ would not exist. Loriano composed the song that Michael von der Heide sang for Switzerland in 2010. But that’s not all. He also appeared on stage as a backing singer and playing the balalaika. Unfortunately, von der Heide didn’t make it past the semi-finals. And Switzerland didn’t fare any better in the coming years. They were usually disqualified in the semi-finals, and if they made it to the final, they finished somewhere near the bottom.

The explanation was always the same: Switzerland isn’t popular in Europe. Loriano told me that he thought this was an excuse. He decided that the whining would only stop if he could prove the opposite – namely that the Swiss were more than capable of creating a song with the potential to win.

Since 2017, his mission has been to lead Switzerland to a Eurovision victory. Back then, he organized a songwriting camp with Suisa, the company that represents Swiss musicians’ copyrights. This measure paid off almost immediately. In 2019, Luca Hänni finished fourth with ‘She Got Me’, and in 2021, Gjon’s Tears reached third place with ‘Tout l’Univers’.

No major music label can do without songwriting camps

Songwriting camps have a mixed reputation. They’re the music industry’s equivalent to a canning factory. Music is written in assembly-line style and sounds mainstream. People are invited to a large studio where they write, sing and produce, teams are created and spread over different rooms, and in the evening, the results are harvested. No major music label can do without songwriting camps because sales have plummeted with the advent of streaming services and music production is no longer allowed to cost anything. Or almost nothing, according to Pele Loriano’s calculations. A song that costs 10,000 Swiss francs to produce and another 10,000 Swiss francs to market must be streamed five million times on Spotify to cover expenses. Not a problem for big players like Taylor Swift who is streamed billions of times; but for Swiss artists, five million is a hard figure to achieve. DJ Bobo is streamed millions of times, as is DJ Antoine, Loredana and, more recently, Priya Ragu. But besides these artists, that’s about it.

Songwriting camps were therefore born out of necessity, which doesn’t mean that good things can’t come out of them. A songwriting camp is like speed dating for music makers; it brings people together who barely know each other, but with a little luck, and if everyone is on board, magic can happen and a song can be created that would otherwise never have been written.

This was the case in May 2023 when Nemo came to Loriano’s songwriting camp. From the start, he’d wanted Nemo to join every year, but Nemo had always been busy, either working in Los Angeles or Berlin, doing some kind of gig, job, or project. Something else had always got in the way.

What’s more, Nemo had taken part in other songwriting camps and was never satisfied with the result. ‘I felt stressed, like something was holding me back. I didn’t manage to put everything I had into them.’

‘Like a perfect storm’

What was different this time? Maybe it began with a misunderstanding. ‘I’d written lots of songs for others in previous years, so I thought I would be in charge of songwriting on my team, not singing,’ says Nemo. ‘So, I was relaxed.’

But the time was also ripe. After years of searching, Nemo knew who Nemo was – and what music Nemo wanted to make. And the teamwork functioned perfectly.

Loriano took on the role of matchmaker. He put four people together who he believed could achieve great things together: Norwegian producer Lasse Midtsian Nymann aka NYLAN, the Swedish songwriter Linda Dale, the Swiss producer Benjamin Alasu and Nemo.

I contacted Lasse Nymann in his studio in Berlin. When I talked to him about that day at camp a year ago, he told me that he got goosebumps again. At the beginning of the day, he didn’t know Nemo. The mornings at songwriting camps are usually the most open because anything is possible. As soon as a line has been written, or a chorus has been composed, decisions are made on how to proceed and then with each step, the possibilities narrow.

This was not the case with Nemo’s team. ‘Nemo’s mentality had a disarming effect,’ Nymann recalls. ‘Nemo was full of enthusiasm and confidence and immediately made it clear that anything could be said and that there were no bad suggestions. And that’s how we worked. It was like a perfect storm. We rolled from passage to passage, and somehow, we always knew what was going to happen next.’

Team psychological safety

The description of the space that the four created is ‘team psychological safety’. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson coined the term and explains it like this: ‘It’s a climate in which it’s OK to take risks, to express ideas and concerns, to speak up with questions, and to admit mistakes.’

Everyone should be able to work in an environment in which they feel psychologically safe, but it is shockingly rare. Such a climate isn’t easy to set up. ‘Psychological safety is not something you can impose on a group from the outside. It’s an emergent property within the group,’ says Amy Edmondson. ‘The team leaders have the greatest influence, followed by the other members of the group. The more respect and curiosity they show each other, the more a sense of belonging is created, which is a prerequisite for us to take risks. Something like: If I fall trying this out, you’ll catch me.’

That’s how ‘The Code’ was created: under pressure, but with the feeling that the others would catch another member if they fell. Someone kept writing if another came up against a wall.

The gender binary is a relic from the past

‘The Code’ is Nemo’s story. It’s about a person realizing that the gender binary is a relic from the past. Nemo does not identify with this relic.

And so, a journey into the hell of self-discovery follows – I went to hell and back – until Nemo is back on track – I found myself on track – by breaking the binary coding of either/or – I broke the code.

‘The Code’ is a coming-of-age song, the cry of a teenager trying to set themself free. A classic pop song, in fact. Historically speaking, pop music often tells the story of someone breaking free from their parents’ generation – Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ are just two examples. Pop music has always been a means of rebellion and an opportunity to break norms. With ‘The Code,’ Nemo wants to break the dogma of gender duality, which some resist because it shakes the foundations of our social order. When people no longer fit into the either/or category of male or female, the consequences are far-reaching because so many areas of our society are organized according to this binary code.

Nemo is fighting for the right to be ambiguous in a world that loves clarity.

But without those other people in the room with Nemo that day, Nemo’s story would never have become a song. ‘The Code’ shows two things – that you’re better in a team than alone. And that you can find love during speed dating.

When music producer and matchmaker Pele Loriano heard the song that evening, he immediately knew it would be the next Swiss Eurovision Song Contest entry. ‘It’s the song that takes the greatest risk,’ he says, ‘but which also holds the greatest opportunities.’

Fehler gefunden?Jetzt melden.