Article by ICG member Stefania Gogna
“Espresso Macchiato” by Tommy Cash (Eurovision Song Contest) is not a “deep” song in the classic sense. But it is precisely this ostentatious lightness that makes it interesting from a semiotic point of view. Espresso Macchiato is luxury, cliché and pop semiotics.
The song is presented as a parade of Western stereotypes, reworked with irony and taken to the extreme: the cult of coffee as an identity ritual, the ostentation of luxury pushed to the point of kitsch, references to the mafia transformed into pop clichés from video clips. There is nothing to “interpret” in a traditional way, rather it is to be observed as a symbolic performance, as a conscious exercise in visual and sound recombination.
Musically it is a surreal mix: electronic beats, lyrical inserts reminiscent of opera and the retro atmospheres of the Belle Époque (the concert cafes or the bourgeois salons of the late 19th century). A pastiche that takes the aesthetics of European elegance and turns it on its head in the language of contemporary excess.
Each element – espresso, macchiato, cash, the text in broccolino (a linguistic variety spoken by Italian Americans in Brooklyn and New York) – is emptied of its original meaning and repackaged in a postmodern advertising logic, where meaning arises more from accumulation than from coherence.
For me he won!
Here: https://lnkd.in/dVBc-9Bx