09. ITALY
Mahmood - “Soldi”
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Much like Jonida, Mahmood sort of slipped for me when I grew more attached to other songs, but that does not mean he’s not fucking amazing! I, too, fell in love with “Soldi” on first listen when I noticed the lyrics rhymed “Ramadan” with “Jackie Chan”. 😍 😍 😍 😍.
Other amazing things about “Soldi” include: the 👏 use 👏 of 👏 clapping 👏 as 👏 punctuation 👏, the ~Iconic~ lines in Arabic during the middle eight and the wonderful message. It was the FIRST SONG IN THIS YEAR WHICH MADE ME SHED A TEAR!!! 😭😭😭 I don’t know how or why, but I listened to the song with translated lyrics and it just *clicked* for me. I WAS LYING SICK IN BED WITH THE FLU, OKAY. Forgive me my momentary weakness!!!
So is it any wonder “Soldi” was greeted with near-unanimous critical acclaim and support? No, of course not. It’s a fantastic song and 100% deserved to win San Remo!
okay, so San Remo... I did *NOT* watch it but I’m aware of Irama, Loredana and Simone, so consider those the reps if I had bothered with an NF corner. Ideal Husband Material, Blue-haired Rocker Hag and Random Dude Who Reads Poetry (not sings. reads.) respectively <3
Slated to win San Remo this year was Ultimo, who entered San Remo with some pretentious piano ballad called “I tuoi particulari” which as the name implies was particularly boring. God what a yawnfest. However, it as also the audience favourite somehow? Him?
So, the juries marked it down just enough so ‘Soldi’ won instead because again, BORING don’t work. Ultimo, instead of being like “well I lost, but oh well, I wasn’t going to Eurovision anyway*”, showed his true Salvador colours by throwing a temper tantrum on social media and spent the entire press conference uglysobbing about how quality was denied (his own words! He refered to *himself* as quality!).
(*he said he would never do Eurovision because he believes it is Eurovision is beneath him 😬)
Oh and some right-wing Forza politicians chimed with their usual drivel that Mahmood was unfit to represent Italy because Mahmood is gay & half-arabic while Italy is a vafanculo blob of fragile masculinity which can only be properly represented by drug-riggen, ugly-tattoo’d brats. Guess what? WE 👏 DON’T👏 CARE. 👏 FOR YOUR 👏 MODERN TIME 👏 PREACHIN’ 👏
FORTUNATELY, Mahmood agreed to do ESC (after a week long thinking period lol) and all was well in this world . 👏 ANOTHER VICTORY FOR QUALITY 👏
Edit note: it has become apparent that my brash and snarky assesment was largely malinformed, but user @wingednerdydude provided a pretty detailed summation of the situation.
It’s a quite long explanation I’ll put a tl;dr to appease the fans: Ultimo did indeed not take the loss well, but the media also took an off-hand comment he made about Mahmood out of context and he retaliated, which led a lot of a unnecessary drama and mutual poo-slinging. It’s not just the ESC fans that overdramatize shit, who knew.
For those who want to read it:
Ultimo never insulted Mahmood or said one single bad thing about him or that his song was better than Soldi, let's make this clear from the start. It's also true that he never even said anything complimenting him or his song. Mahmood actually said he never spoke to him nor heard from him in any way. The only thing Ultimo ever said is that he is happy for Mahmood and his success, that's it. If Ultimo really did compliment him then I never read or watched such interview
The mess during Sanremo's press conference blew up right when Ultimo said he was happy for (I'm quoting) "the other ragazzo, Mahmood". Ragazzo is a really neutral term in Italian, it just means young man, I wouldn't know how to traslate it. The journalists found it "insulting" for some weird reason (Mahmood actually said he thinks it's a totally okay term) and said Ultimo was disrespecting him. More context: Ultimo clearly was disappointed about his 2nd place
The press knew it and since the moment he entered the press room they literally started rubbing his missed victory in his face and kept asking him "yeah, but don't you think you should have won?". Ultimo eventually got pissed like mad and rightfully so. They were literally trying to make him lose his temper because they knew he had a bad character and was disappointed. They wanted a scoop and they got it.
Ultimo told the journalists that they were just trying to get an article out of it and that any thing he would say, they would turn it into something else. Then he said (quoting) "I'm fucking done with you". Boom, all of the press room went crazy and started throwing insults at him (sore loser, shit, bastard, ungrateful etc...). At some point Mahmood entered the room and the situation got chill again. By the way, look at the Il Volo guys while he speaks. They agreed.
Which takes us to the next step: why did Ultimo explode like that? I'll get ther: the day after there was a tv program the contestants were supposed to take part in. Ultimo didn't show up. It was full of journalists who obviously insulted him, they showed the clip of Ultimo insulting the press. One of the journalists though, she gave no fucks and just said the things as they were: and that is, the press insulted him. Not only after Ultimo's insults, but also earlier.
Ultimo wasn't the only artist who got insulted: the guys from Il Volo were too, during their performance and while the results were being announced (everyone cheered cause they hadn't won). The journalist says there were clips of it. Ups, looks like they "couldn't show them". Funny how they found Ultimo insulting journalists, but not the opposite. And those videos exist. In particular, there was a video of Ultimo being insulted by press, days before
There were a lot of talks, clickbaity articles written etc... Ultimo tried speaking in a video he posted and told his point of view. Now, mind you, I don't agree with some of the stuff he said. He said that he was sad about the whole thing and that it had been blown out of proportion, his words twisted to show him like the bad guy. And this is true if you read what I wrote. About the results: he was pissed because he had won the televote by a very large margin but lost.
Here I think he was really wrong, cause those are the rules, jury and televote results add up to the final result, it's maths. It may be disappointing, but that's how it is. Still, he was sad that people had to PAY to vote and their votes didn't matter in the end to choose the actual winner. Debatable. But he did make a good point about one thing: the jury votes are made of the votes of some experts (they're like 10 and actually often are people with no music knowledge)
And the rest of the jury votes are journalists. Now, wait a second: the same journalists who threw personal insults at him and Il Volo for no reason if not a personal anthipathy were the ones deciding if they could win or not. Now this is interesting, cause the jury is supposed to be unbiased. His complaining about this is just right in my opinion, something should have been done about it (journalists faced no consequences for their insults to contestants).
This is where the whole thing ended. Ultimo just asked not to speak about it again, Sanremo's week has now well passed and everyone moved on, so that's literally all. I hope I was of some help to better understand the situation. And please guys, no fighting, let's just enjoy Mahmood's song.
AND LET US NEVER SPEAK OF HIM EVER AGAIN!!!!!! ~moving on~
Autoqualifier Odds: very good
The most important thing one has to take away from “Soldi” is that it’s a fucking excellent song. There’s a reason it received near-universal critical acclaim from all sources.
But, as the saying goes, it’s not the song but what you do with it. Mahmood is making great ~live performance progress~ as more pre-parties are showing his growing expertise, but at the same time I feel like everyone has sort of forgotten about him as a potential winner?
Actually my friends posited the idea that Mahmood might be a Jamala-esque winner (by finishing second in both jury AND televote) and I think that is an intriguing possibility we should consider! If Duncan somehow doesn’t come through (and he won’t because Expected Winner’s Curse), it will be Mahmood who shall pick up the pieces and win instead. (unless the audience wants to go for the novelty act again, in which case Hatari or Bilal will win)
I recognize that Mahmood could go down the usual Italy trajectory and be sandbagged by juries into a mid top 10 placement, I guess. I don’t want to get my hopes up and overrate his odds like I did with Gabbani. Even under the worst circumstance, Mahmood is definitely finishing somewhere in the top 10 though, as all Italian men (fragile or not) do.
Projected placement: 1st-8th in the Grand Final.
