Conan Osíris: the flamboyant outsider denied his shot at Eurovision
When Jimmy Carr toured Portugal this March, he mocked the country’s Eurovision contender, Conan Osíris. “Why has he got spoons on his face? And who’s that guy who dances next to him with the long fingernails? If he wins, we won’t feel so bad about leaving the European Union.”
His remarks were mild compared with what Osíris has received at home, where his costumes (masses of feathers and face masks), unusual dancer (childhood friend João Reis Moreira) and multicultural sound have made him a cultural lightning rod. Local comedians have mocked him by taping spoons to their faces, while woke kids argue that his music, steeped in pop and hip-hop as well as Portuguese fado and frenzied Angolan kuduro, walks the line of cultural appropriation. But Osíris brushes off their claims. “People see the ‘freak show’ part, but for me, my music is normal.”
Osíris was one of the most talked about acts ahead of this year’s song contest – at least until he was voted off in Tuesday’s semi-finals. The fact that he won’t appear is surprising, given that his entry, Telemóveis (Mobile Phones), won Portugal’s televised Eurovision heats by a landslide, earning 64% of the vote (second place Calema got 13%), and the clip of Osíris and Reis Moreira’s performance – the one with the feathers and claws – went viral. During the semi-finals, the BBC’s Eurovision Twitter account acknowledged how far ahead of the competition he seemed: “We’re all watching Eurovision 2019 while Portugal are performing at Eurovision 2039 y’all.” He was such a strong contender that Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters was moved to write him an open letter praising his music but pleading with him not to appear at the event in Israel; Osíris didn’t respond.
When we meet in Berlin in early March, Osíris and Reis Moreira are out of their gaudy stage costumes. It is the day after a packed show at which Osíris invited the crowd – mostly Portuguese expats but also some curious locals – on stage to sing and dance along to his infectious songs. Now the pair are relaxing in athleisure and drinking tea in a cafe. Thirty-year-old Osíris – born Tiago Miranda – grew up in Lisbon’s multicultural suburbs, where he was steeped in music from North African immigrant communities: heated kuduro, sensual kizomba and accordion-based funaná. Aged eight, he lost his father to drug addiction. His classmates and teachers bullied him for his physical appearance, which he now describes as “urban Our Lady” – a hoodie, long hair and three crucifix pendants.
He and Reis Moreira formed an unlikely bond against the world, despite a fairly significant age gap. When Moreira was 11, his older sister finally let him go to her annual new year’s eve party. He had met Osíris, then 17, before, but that’s where he first saw him dancing “exactly as he wanted and acting exactly as he wanted”, Reis Moreira recalls. “That gave me strength.”
Coming from similarly multicultural neighbourhoods, they complemented each other. Reis Moreira’s style of dance was influenced by impro
visation, but also the strictures of ballet: he’s often en pointe in his Nikes. “There’s no choreography,” he says. “Everything influences the moment, so I never have a plan.” They only started performing live together this year, after Osíris found national success with his latest album, Adoro Bolos (I Love Pastries). It also allowed him to give up his job in a Lisbon sex shop, after a decade spent making music in the Portuguese underground.
Osíris’s success has been provocative in Portugal, where men are expected to be clean-cut and macho, not bedecked in glitter. But after a stubborn initial reaction, people remembered that this was also how they had received the now beloved 80s gay icon António Variações (whom Osíris sounds rather like). In daily newspaper Público, the respected critic Miguel Esteves Cardoso declared: “Listening to [Osíris] singing is like witnessing an interminable and unsolvable discussion over the origins of fado: there is Gypsy singing, Andalusian singing and Maghrebin singing.” Now, the public have recognised Osíris as a one-of-akind manifestation of contemporary Portugal, a country with a perpetual saudade for its past and powered by the contradictions of modern multicultural living.
In his lyrics, Osíris mixes traditional themes of love and loss with contemporary concerns over sexuality and the body. Celulitite mocks the insignificance of cellulite, while the title track of Adoro Bolos comments on the Catholic outrage around the legalisation of gay adoption in Portugal in 2016.
From Dana International to Armenia’s 2015 entry drawing attention to denial of the country’s genocide, Eurovision often hosts acts who make big statements. Still, it feels odd for an experimental, outsider pop artist like Osíris to want to participate. Why did he enter? “It was a creativity exercise,” he says. “We didn’t look at the festival as kitsch, or give it any pre-imposed qualities – I just saw it as any other platform. I didn’t even think about the consequences of getting through.”
Some critics accused his song of being vacuous drivel (“I broke my mobile phone / Trying to ring heaven”), though many have connected Osíris’s expression of loss with the death of his father. Osíris won’t comment but, prior to his elimination, he had hoped the song’s diverse influences – mixing Afrobeats with a style of singing reminiscent of fado and a droning quality redolent of Middle Eastern music – would represent the country’s multiculturalism, showing international audiences that “Portugal is so much more than Lisbon and Porto”.
The day after his elimination from the contest, Osíris leaves me a voicemail, sounding sad and annoyed as he moves between Portuguese and English, singing and talking. He sounds dejected: “There’s nothing I can say-ay-ay,” he trills. It mirrors a sense of injustice in Portugal, where the country is now rallying around a performer they were mocking just months ago. It is hard not to be disappointed, but the restlessly creative Osíris surely has more significant musical frontiers to conquer in the future. And I remember something he said when we met in March, about how he didn’t care about winning the competition. “Any time someone who is segregated from society tells me I’m representing them,” he said, “to me, that’s already an honour.”