SURLAW - The Homervision Fongcontest!

Hello, and welcome to Homer J. Fong's SURLAW!




What is Surlaw?
Well it’s like the opposite of Walrus – instead of everyone submitting songs to a host who judges them, the host picks the songs and the denizens in Forum Games judge them via PM.
Each person submits their top ten, and a Eurovision-style reveal is done when all results are counted.

We’ve had three successful Surlaws to date, from Also Starring LeVar Burton, Necro and lassykk. Hopefully I can keep the momentum going.

How It Will Work:
- You will be given a Youtube playlist and Spotify playlist containing the 20 songs that are in contention.
- Listen to all 20 songs and pick out your 10 favourites (or, if you don’t like any of them, the 10 you dislike least! )
- When you’ve decided your top ten, send me your ranking via PM. Please number your choices 1-10, with 1 being your favourite, 2 your second favourite and so on.
- Just like Eurovision, your favourite song will score 12 points, your 2nd favourite 10 points and so on.
- When signups are closed, I will start a Reveal thread in the Other Forum Games forum and you’ll discover which song has triumphed.

Why did I choose these 20 songs?
One thing I love about Eurovision is hearing songs from countries I wouldn’t normally listen to music from. And with that in mind I decided to go through my personal playlists and pick out 20 artists who all hail from different countries across the world. I managed to pick at least one representative from each continent (excluding Antarctica! :pac:) I also tried to keep a reasonable mix of musical genres, so as not to be too repetitive – in this competition you will find alternative rock, indie-folk, murky synthpop, smooth jazz, frantic flamenco-pop and dreamy shoegaze among others. (I didn’t manage to fit in any heavy metal though, I’m afraid.)

Other criteria I went with were
- include a roughly 50:50 split of male:female artists
- try not to include the most “obvious” artist from each country (i.e. no Björk for Iceland, no Arcade Fire for Canada, no Nick Cave for Australia, etc.)
- where I think an artist is likely to be reasonably well-known, try not to pick their biggest hit

These are songs I’ve discovered at various points in my life; some remind me of my teenage years, others I discovered via Shazam while on holiday, and some I even discovered while doing research this Surlaw! Some are happy songs, some are sad songs……the only thing they really all have in common is that I enjoy them! And I hope you do too.

I'll post the songs on thread following this post, in the meantime here are the links you'll need, and a little flag collage I made for the 20 countries competing!

I'll keep signups open for a couple of weeks at least, so you've plenty of time to get listening.

tl;dr?

1. Listen to the 20 songs in the following playlists.
2. PM me your top ten, ranking from 1-10 (1 being your favourite).


SPOTIFY playlist

YOUTUBE playlist