ABSTRACT
At its inception, traditional cultural studies was concerned with bringing scholarly weight and attention to aspects of ‘low’ or popular cultural life that were often not valued equally to ‘high’ cultural forms, such as art, literature and more traditional forms of music, like opera. This chapter looks at how the history of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) can be useful for also examining shifts in the theories and methods of cultural studies. The chapter focuses on the shifting aesthetics of the contest as a signifier of its increasing democratisation and the rising power of the fan and the audience in the modern ESC.
