ESC Etc.

Country: Croatia
Artist: Baby Lasagna
Title: Rim tim tagi dim
Songwriter(s): Marko Purišić
Tempo: 128 BPM Mode: Major Key: A Duration: 2:59

“THERE’S NO GOING BAAAAAACK.” Croatia gone done the thing. I’m not one to overanalyze coincidences much, but there’s something to be said about February 25 slowly becoming a momentous date in ESC lore – Cha Cha Cha won UMK on February 25, 2023, the same exact day Loreen officially debuted Tattoo at Melodifestivalen, and exactly one year later (following two months of rallying cries from the fandom) Baby Lasagna was crowned the winner of Dora 2024 with Rim tim tagi dim, shooting all the way to #2 in the odds to win ESC in the hours following his victory (the song is also currently #2 on MESC trailing Italy only). When a track causes such a seismic shift, it has got to mean something, no?

I’ve already reviewed the song when I analyzed Dora in an earlier post, where I labeled it as a potential ESC winner. That hasn’t changed – this and Italy are so far the only tracks that outright scream Eurovision champion to me – but there’s always more to discuss, isn’t there! Like how, for example, HRT should fire the whole Dora selection team that had originally rejected this song and placed it as an alternate (it bears repeating – Baby Lasagna only got to compete because one of the artists in the original lineup ended up withdrawing before the beginning of the event), an alarming sign that Croatia’s middling results at ESC could be realistically attributed to the fact that great tracks from little-known acts are getting rejected by incompetent people with, uh…shady agendas (ALLEGEDLY). Like how this song’s televote score in the final was 10 times (that’s not a typo) bigger than the score for the act that came in second place (247 pts vs 27…again, not a typo). Like how this track was going to have to overcome adversarial juries that would never go for something so out of the box (Baby Lasagna ended up winning juries, too). Like how the three performances Baby Lasagna gave over the course of his two competition nights were his literal first three live performances ever as a solo act, each besting the previous one in terms of confidence, sound, and kinetics. Like how there’s already a phenomenal staging concept attached to the track that will only get better now that the delegation and the artist have time to pump additional money, thought, and time into it. Do you know how sometimes you sit in front of an entry and, at the end of those three minutes, both your gut and your brain are telling you there’s something special about it? Yeah.

Jury Potential: This won juries (a combo of national and international) at home. There’s something to be said about that. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I also think a fair amount of jurors will be able to understand and appreciate the lyrical content and the craft that went into producing this.
Televote Potential: We might just be looking at our televote winner right here.