Lights! Camera! Factions! Your Eurovision Song Contest 2021 Cheat Sheet

This Saturday, May 22, on or around 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, you may sense a diffuse but palpable shift in the global marketplace of finite resources. At that time, vast stockpiles of sequins, lasers, dry ice and fireworks scattered around the world will dry up spontaneously—only to reappear all at once, en masse, on a stage in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Yep: It's Eurovision time.

The Eurovision Song Contest pits 26 European nations — and sometimes Australia (long story) — against one another in a three-hour display of pure, exuberant, insanely catchy and/or just plainly insane songs, painstakingly engineered by teams of professionals to worm their way into the ears and hearts of an audience numbering in the hundreds of millions.

Each song clocks in at three minutes in length, and tends to slot into one of three categories:

1. Bops Up-tempo, egregiously catchy tunes made for the darkest, sweatiest, stickiest dancefloor in, say, Ibiza. Generally involve backup dancers who haven't had a carb since the London Olympics.

2. Anthems Stirring, bombastic, heedlessly over-the-top barn-burners about not giving up, or standing up, or looking up, possibly. Something with "up," anyway. Dance moves, if any, are scaled way way back in favor of posing defiantly.

Slow, emotional, achingly sincere. No dancing, no backup