And now the question from curious me – can you or someone else who remember describe what pots 2 and 3 were like music-wise?
Pot 3 in a
nutshell banana skin:
In all seriousness, as one of the original members of Pot 3 I'd describe us as the hipster pot. In a time when the contest was a lot more mainstream and pop-oriented we often aimed to stand out and be "original" (or as you can see in the banner above, made by yours truly at the time pots were first introduced for NSC 18, we were the contest's "oddballs"). Internet memes, gimmicky entries (like the banana-themed streak we had going at one point, as seen in the spoiler) and heavy metal were some of our trademarks, or simply genres that few people would otherwise send.
We weren't exactly out to provoke though (not
that much anyway), we took the contest seriously, we were true to ourselves and sent entries we actually liked. But results were usually not in our favour, and we received numerous accusations of deliberately trolling and ruining the contest by being "weird" or (false claims of) friendly voting, something that's been parodied in this list that I still occasionally update:
Pot 3 purposely sends entries they don't like just to annoy NSC Pot 3 votes for the worst songs on purpose Pot 3 is the breeding ground of evil Pot 3 causes cancer Pot 3 has W.M.D.s Pot 3 supports terrorism Pot 3 supports Guantanamo Pot 3 fucks their friends Pot 3 makes your oranges bitter Pot 3 ...
docs.google.com
A lot of historical Pot 3 nations are still in the contest (Reym-L-Dneurb, Ugaly, Yaponesia, Halito, Tír an Abhainn, Cydoni-Gibberia...) and are largely the same as ever, but a lot of the things we used to send are more commonplace now and we don't stand out in the same way, and of course our own preferences for what we send and vote for have evolved and expanded over the years.
I'm sure other people will give very different accounts of what Pot 3 was like, but that's a brief history from my perspective.
I'll have to leave the history of Pot 2 to someone else though.
