After sitting out the Eurovision Song Contest in 2013 for financial reasons, Bosnia and Herzegovina has announced it will return for the 2014 competition!
This is great news for me because B&H is always one of my favorite entries. Bosnian performers are very well received at Eurovision, and they have reached the final every year since 2004.
DJ BoBo was definitely onto something here. The vampire craze was about to hit hard in the United States. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight novels were the biggest selling books in 2008. That same year, the film adaptations of her novels, starring sexy teen vampire, Robert Pattinson, and the object of his sexy vampire desire, Kristen Stewart, were also released. They grossed $392 million (US) worldwide. The first episode of HBO's True Blood debuted in 2008. And a year later, another television show about sexy teen vampires, The Vampire Diaries, premiered. In America, vampires were really, really cool. You couldn't go into a Borders without seeing a dozen displays of sexy vampire spin-off books and keychains and coffee cups and other useless things.
But in Europe, DJ BoBo's "Vampires Are Alive" did not make it to the finals. Despite DJ BoBo's international fame, he received only forty points and placed twentieth in the semi-finals. The song was not without controversy: a group of conservative Swiss Christians drew up a petition to get the song disqualified, as they felt it celebrated Satanism and encouraged teen suicide. Additionally, many Europeans felt that DJ BoBo was too famous to participate in Eurovision. Perhaps that's why the song did so poorly.
