Gil Laufer:
Inbal Bibi – Zaza (Israel)
The first song that was revealed among the eight songs of X Factor for Eurovision 2022 was Zaza by Inbal Bibi. Despite being my personal favourite, thanks to the mix of east and west, the structure and the combination of English and Hebrew that worked well, it failed going through the song selection show and was not chosen as Inbal’s song for the final.
Following the selection, the songwriter May Sfadía released her demo version of Zaza, which revealed the skews of using a reality show for choosing the Eurovision entry. When the production is responsible for matching between songs and artists, decides on the staging and leaves limited artistic freedom for the artists, it is unlikely that we will get an authentic and sincere entry, like the ones who end up in the top 10 nowadays. If Israel had a regular national selection, we could possibly see May performing Zaza herself as she wouldn’t have to go through a whole season of reality TV. In a regular national selection, it could succeed and might get a better result in Eurovision too.
Click through to the next page, below the emojis, to see what Constantinos Christou has chosen!
