Understanding Sanremo 2024 Geolier controversy: a deep dive
I cannot believe Sanremo made me defend the artist Geolier for once in my life, but here we are.
Sanremo Music Festival 2024 came and went as a spectacle that it always has been, leaving the viewers with so many moments to remember for years, ranging from big and powerful humanitarian statements, to small and silly moments that aren’t meaningful but are still spiritually a part of what makes Sanremo awesome (like the woman of Ricchi e Poveri always looking like she got coked out of her mind). But undeniably, the biggest spectacle of a MUSIC festival, is of course, the music. (It’s actually the memes, but it’s not Sanremo Meme Festival, therefore...)
This year’s level of Sanremo music seemed to have astronomically surpassed all of the previous years in recent memory, or just the entire Amadeus administration as a whole - although, my mostly fondly remembered year will always be 2021, for all kinds of reasons. But 2024 was only objectively good. Subjectively it was mostly alright. I didn’t heavily dislike any songs, only felt sorely underwhelmed by my bottom 2 songs from artists I don’t really like all that much, but that’s mostly it. Hence, for the first time in a while, I didn’t feel like I had a song that I fell fully head over heels for on first listen. There was no basic heartfelt man ballad quite like Tananai’s “Tango”, no living art museum exhibit emotional masterpiece like Michele Bravi’s “Inverno dei fiori”, no hypnotizingly catchy and lyrically-sharp-edged piece like Willie Peyote’s “Mai dire mai (la locura)”... and I felt like this Sanremo is going to exhaust me for good, to the point of me getting back to passively following Sanremo and only listen to the songs on Spotify on the final night all over again.
But eventually, I ranked all the entries of this year’s edition. And somehow, just somehow, there was a song that stood out anyways.
(not going to embed the Sanremo performance because Rai will cut it down to one minute after a few days anyway, and it’s not fun)
Meet Geolier, a 23 year old Naples represent rapper, born and raised on the genre, and is the second Sanremo 2024 act to be using something French for his stage name (the other obviously being someone else’s surname making a funny surname gag band name, but I won’t be talking about them until it’s time), as the word “geôlier” is French for “jailer”. Not to be mistaken for a fancy way of saying “gioielliere” (‘jeweler’ in Italian). The lad is very popular as of currently, racking up Spotify streams like mad, holding out several important positions in Spotify Top 50 Italy charts for a few continuous days/weeks/months, among those songs doing that is one that he was a part of that’s actually co-written by THE Tananai of Sanremo 2022-23 fame?? And it’s easy to see why it’s easy for him to get away with all this - the current rap/trap scene of Italy is insanely huge in streaming numbers in general, the beats can be possibly enjoyable, it’s just cool music for “cool” guys who wear tracksuits all day and have probably considered getting a face tat. Mindless brain scratchers made to be streamed, enjoyed, and raised into the top of the Spotify popularity rankings.
It’s already impressive that he got this far as a 2000-born, which is arguably starting to look less and less young as the years go by, but Geolier’s a part of the music industry for a long enough time, and it’s much cooler to be successful in such business when you’re young and with the world at your feet. So, the big Sanremo launch should be the next exciting step for his career, right?
Apparently, what happened was that, if you didn’t have any Sanremo context at hand, you’d think that Geolier was the most currently hated person in all of Italy on the Sanremo week.
But why exactly?
The entire ordeal comes off to me as a big puzzle consisting of several parts, and once you put them together, you get the perfectly painful picture of the Geolier Sanremo backlash. I’ve been dying to address it as soon as I’m a lot less stressed about the entire week - I could feel it taking a toll on my mental health at how nervous I constantly felt about not finding a favourite Sanremo song, and then having to be ready to defend a song like I’m the armour that the song would wear for protection. So let’s take a look at what made Geolier feel like the biggest villain of Sanremo 2024, and address it, for once and for all:
1) Sanremo “had” to stop the misogyny
You see, Sanremo 2024 story arc was always, from the get go, “The Year That A Woman Must Win Because It’s Been 10 Years Since”. Italian music industry tends to be in favour of the XY chromosome representatives, and statistically the female side of it is heavily struggling with recognition, because it doesn’t look like the type of music that the aforementioned “cool” tracksuit wearing lads would easily get into - like, are the women often prone to be making rap/trap tracks? Some do, I guess. It doesn’t sound like the music that represents the specific type of street cred masculines, I suppose. But this year’s Sanremo lineup came rushing in with a strong female roster... which only made up 9,5 of the lineup of 30 songs. It ain’t much, but it’s honest work, amirite? Any amount should do, as long as it includes at least one woman that was pre-destined to have a following fandom so big that they’ll do anything for her?
And the femmes of this year’s roster did give off solid performances. The big darling of the Eurovision fan bubble, Annalisa, brought yet another catchy dance sensation “Sinceramente”, and the fans were madly rooting for it to be finally her year. The living legend and meme woman Alessandra Amoroso poured the hell of her heart out on a classic woman ballad “Fino a qui” (guess that since Annalisa wasn’t doing one, someone had to fill her shoes). The absolute icon of all time that’s still kicking at age 73, Loredana Bertè, shone once again with her iconic blue hair and the striking self-loving rock song anthem “Pazza”. The graceful Sanremo 2017 runner-up Fiorella Mannoia let herself get loose for this one and spiritually took us to the streets of Madrid with the Latin-inspired “Mariposa” (hence the title?). The second previous Sanremo female winner and Italian representative of 2014 Emma was there too with “Apnea”. We also got some really cool debuts from the gals like BigMama, Rose Villain, and the biggest surprise of them all, the Sanremo Giovani winner Clara (seriously, “Diamanti grezzi” is a pop club MASTERPIECE).
By the end of Nights 2 and 3 though, Geolier outperformed everyone with the song I posted earlier, “I p’ me, tu p’ te”. And this was “seemingly” going against the narrative of a female victory.
This sparked people on Twitter to assume that well, Geolier is a man, so he must have everything handed to him on a silver platter, that he is being praised and showered with support for doing the bare minimum, that he could do *REDACTED* into the microphone and still be rewarded, etc. And from Sanremo point of view, it’s understandable to immediately jump into that conclusion, even if you understood that Geolier is one of the biggest streamed artists of the current moment in Italy, has legitimate fans, and sells out shows. Much like of what the men that the Eurofandom is already familiar with - Mahmood, Ghali, Irama - also have going for them. Even if there’s quite the Sanremo privilege of favouring the chaps, the Eurovision fandom and a lot of the others are more often than not likely to root for the gal pals, because the world needs its queens too.
There was of course another side of this part of the backlash - people calling out those that want women to win something just for the sake of a woman winning, free from whether the song is good or not. That it’s ridiculous to assume that ALL men are rewarded for doing the bare minimum because they suddenly came out of nowhere in the ranking and are threatening their precious princesses for just... being there? So it’s possibly being tired of the forced feminism being a thing in music competitions, completely irrelevant to whether the music is good or not, just because some people decided that Sanremo MUST be won by a woman, because it would just be so unfair otherwise.
I just like to take this to say that I don’t really care anymore which gender wins what competition; even with myself having a lot of national final winners be male, I tend to enjoy girl bangers and what not, and to me the “omg this country hates women” remains a tired-ass but still a tried and true anecdote. Sanremo was strongly likeable as balls, and objectively, the eventual winner girlie Angelina Mango nailed on each night she was in, and her song “La noia” was just too undeniably catchy otherwise. And it’d be easier to enjoy Sanremo if you don’t give a damn and enjoy the show for the music. (In the very end we ended up having people be into some of the men songs, especially by those already familiar to followers of Italian music scene, but they weren’t the big centre of the backlash as much as Geolier, supposedly...)
2) Geolier doesn’t “represent” Italy
Representation matters, just as equally as it does to women in Sanremo, just as equally as it does to POC in Sanremo, just as equally as it does to the Neapolitans in Sanremo.
Because apparently, the Italian South overrepresentation has become a problem this year?
Naples, I am not 100% knee deep in their lore, but I know that it has by far a massive mountain of memes, especially in terms of music, and the so-called “neomelodic” genre where the music is painfully “book me for your weddings/Christenings/birthdays/etc.”-core with the singers that seem to “romantically” mumble their way through a song in Neapolitan dialect. They are strongly distinct. They are passionate for their kind. They seem to make the best pizza. They won Serie A that one time, and maybe if you had a Neapolitan friend, you’d never end up hearing the end of it from him/her at the time of it happening. And yet, somehow, it presents to be a problem that Geolier comes from there and has a massive background backing?
The argument for this piece of the backlash raises the point that he seems to be representing only his own region and nothing else. Because it’s only the Neapolitans apparently that are for him, because no other common person from Milan, Rome, Bologna, Venice, etc. would be rooting for him as hard as a Neapolitan ever would, just because regional patriotism. Which... if you argue for regional televoting removal in Sanremo, wouldn’t it hurt to remember Tanxugueiras from Benidorm Fest 2022? They also had massive regional backing behind them (Galicia), would you argue that they only represent Galicia? Outside that, there’s also the part of Spain that genuinely wanted to see them as their representatives - Galicia was just a really loud supportive region. So is Naples in case of Geolier. He was by far their biggest and most noteworthy representative (BigMama sadly didn’t make much noise, although she’s from elsewhere than Naples directly). So, regional/hometown bias/pride will always exist and continue existing, and there’s nothing I can offer you to do about it if you can’t grasp that, but ultimately the bias can only contribute to the majority, not completely overwhelm it. And it’s possible that the non-Neapolitan fans of his also chimed in, too, therefore you can’t always fully tell me that it was ONLY Naples that wanted him.
Worth noting that, in terms of Eurovision, we always clamour for cool songs in, besides native languages, cool dialects/languages, like Breton for France (and how it already happened in 2022 most recently), and Catalan for Spain; Neapolitan dialect is apparently very underrepresented in Sanremo in general, to the point of creative director Amadeus apparently “breaking” the rules to allow a song in dialect to compete next to songs in good old Italian (lies, dialectal songs were always a thing in Sanremo, just scarce). And in terms of Eurovision, the last time a Neapolitan song represented Italy was when they hosted in 1991. A woman hasn’t won Sanremo in 10 years, a Neapolitan song hasn’t won Sanremo in... possibly ever?
(There are some that chalk this lashing out at Neapolitans up to classism, which must be a really deep lore of treating Naples as the butt of the Italian jokes that I wasn’t told about or heard about at all whatsoever, but I am at too many limits to discuss that.)
3) The song is “mid” and would tank in Eurovision
On a first listen, a song must make a massively great impression one way or another, otherwise it’s not worth talking about. It could be just my music taste going to shit (for a lack of a better way to explain it), but “I p’ me, tu p’ te” clicked with me on the first listen? The beat is smooth, giving off cool club vibes. The vibes are very chilled out and cool sounding. The vocal delivery of Geolier doesn’t annoy me one bit. The chorus is somewhat solidly delivered and gets stuck in my head just like that. The song title being repeated adds to the flavour. My favourite part of the song is when said title is left repeated after the 2nd chorus, the synth beeping line gets added to the melody, and I just lose myself in the moment of it all - the silent violin sounds in the backgrounds just go up in the notes by the time the extended repetition bit ends, and it’s some of the prettiest song detail designing that I’ve ever heard, not going to lie. It’s specific moments like these that would always bring me back to certain songs, just so I could feel it fall into place just like that all over again - be overwhelmed by the need to dance, the need to feel every vibe of the track that I’m getting, sometimes having the elements of the song that’d better be left out of the final cut (sometimes I don’t like it when Geolier gets too whispery, particularly at the very end of the song), the need to feel alive when listening to it.
But of course, taste is subjective, and another big problem for the people ends up being that the song is too “mid” and it would be painful to see it win a Festival of such prestige.
First of all, God forbid someone sends a song that isn’t a ballad Sanremese, eventhough it wouldn’t make sense for Geolier to ever do that anyway. Second of all, there’s far worse “mid”-tier stuff out there, one that sparks even less of a reaction, but can sometimes be still voted up based on someone’s personality I guess? Third of all, does every festival need to always have a perfect track record in quality, although that should definitely help if it does?
And on top of that, WHY do people consider this a mid effort?
For one, had it gone to Eurovision, it would represent a little bit of something different - not because it’s Neapolitan, it’s because it’s a pop song sung by a man, and that pop song isn’t slutty, or a midtempo “vocal” “showoff” type. The year’s already going to have its fun songs that aren’t always necessarily for the clubs (maybe a few for Finland’s entry, since it banks on 90s nostalgia), its Rag’n’Bone Man wannabe, the dramatic ballads, the folksy gut-punchers, so on. Maybe “I p’ me, tu p’ te”’s direct Eurovision 2024 season rival could only end up being - and I’m aware this will be a hard stretch to say - “Luktelk” by Silvester Belt from the Lithuanian NF? Afterall, Eurofans love lumping songs that vaguely resemble similar songs in the competition based on vibes despite sounding nothing like each other, although Geolier is clearly not a twink. (Way too much waffle about him getting flowers for doing the bare minimum when he doesn’t seem to look like an absolute eye candy compared to the other Sanremo men - just your average chaperone, no more, no less.) So in my opinion, this kind of stands out. Granted, not all songs of this calibre smash the competition in hindsight...
But frankly, in a background of this being a song that is somewhat Eurovision affiliated, despite coming from a song festival that is capable of standing separately from it, this doesn’t sound so bad - it simply got tangled up in a song festival that may have seen way bigger smash hit type of songs. In grandness, “I p’ me, tu p’ te” doesn’t have the infectiousness of “Ciao ciao” from La Rappresentante di Lista, or the instantness of last year’s Sanremo runner-up song that clearly seemed to be using a similar formula of sound - “Cenere” by Lazza - but it doesn’t always have to be like something else to have a charm that affects at least SOME viewers, right? Smooth song with a beat that is overwhelmingly catchy and danceable, there may be a song that already exists that fills that description for every other person than me, but for me it’s “I p’ me, tu p’ te”.
And Eurovision audience that’s not made up of hardcore viewers don’t care about the songs that lost national selections of countries that had them - you might be telling them to listen to “Gladiator” by Jann for them to get a little disappointed that it didn’t represent its country, but you would never be told this information if you focus on whoever represents the country itself while watching the event without the social media influence. Every country’s commentator won’t be constantly like “here’s this song, fun fact, the fans of Eurovision wanted to see some other song representing them instead, but it sadly didn’t win” when talking about an entry. They will just present the representative, and will give first time viewers a song the way it is, out there, on the stage. From what I can tell, the first impression that “I p’ me, tu p’ te” gave off during Sanremo week wasn’t inherently repulsive, therefore it would have been possible that, even without the Italian bias aid, the non-Sanremo enjoyers would have been doing the Renata Bliss dances to this, and given it a significant voting boost. It’s accessible, it’s an ear worm, it’s not a visual disaster of any kind, who cares that it’s in dialect that no one understands - there are at least 3 lines in the chorus that are Italian, so it’s not even a fully Neapolitan song, but the thought counts - me enjoy song, me vote song. Simple as that.
(Sidenote: mid definitely has a place in the hearts of someone in Eurovision, how the hell else did Cyprus do so well last year with a gymbro howling to a pop midtempo that isn’t anything remotely too special? OOOOOOOOOOOOO ROASTED)
4) Not the best discography
This sounds like a nitpick point, but I’ve also seen the reasoning that some local people don’t like Geolier’s discography as a whole, making it seem like that not even his seemingly poppiest crossover effort is salvaging the entire discography, and I get it. You wouldn’t necessarily want your new favourite artists that you discovered on Sanremo to have a displeasing back catalogue, because you will not end up becoming a stan. You may not like rap/trap as a whole, and then someone comes on to release their most mainstream-appeal type of track to trick you into believing that maybe the rap/trap guys do have range in the end, and then be proven wrong. That being said, the streaming era of Spotify shows that the world seems to have a large preference for rappers and all other artist of similar calibre, and that builds legitimate fans. They may be more leaning towards the generic “cars, money, women” music than others. Again, mindless brain scratchers. But that doesn’t mean that it’s fair to dunk on That One Song just because said song is too superior in comparison to other songs in someone’s discography.
And I do admit that I’m not a rap/trap girlie. I’ve heard a few Geolier songs before the Festival. It was only during the Festival that I enjoyed the most out of anything Geolier, so besides That One Song, I haven’t been converted into a hoodie-with-a-big-blue-N-letter-sign-wearing street nuisance otherwise. It happens. Someone you don’t care about releases the catchiest song you’ve ever heard of them ever and that’s the only time you care. If you’re the type of person who cares to explore the discography of someone who participated in a music competition/festival/etc. because you think you may have found a new favourite artist through something because of That One Song more than I am, I’m not stopping you. The rest might be a let down, but they shouldn’t completely overwhelm That One Song that was just the right amount of good.
5) Riggery
In Sanremo 1992, a man of the name Mario Appignani showed up on the Night 1 of the event, infamously proclaiming that “questo Festival è truccato” (this festival is rigged) and that the winner will end up being Fausto Leali (who in turn ended up only 9th). The Mario fella is just your regular stage invader, akin to Jimmy Jump or the guy in Australia flag flashing his ass, but people still remember him to this day and would reason any anomalic result of the festival as it being “truccato”, anecdotally or otherwise.
Looping back to point 2), representation matters, and this year the great highlight of Southern Italy just focused on their biggest name, however it still annoyed a great deal of Sanremo experiencers that Geolier’s televote numbers stick out like a sore thumb, to the point of some journalist revealing that during Nights 2 and 3 he had the standout televote percentages, which may have resulted the fans of the Sanremo girls to experience this meme so hard and so fast:
Nothing comes remotely as close as baffling in terms of “televote riggery” as the results of Sanremo’s Cover Night exhibition, where Geolier and his friends showed up to perform a greatest hits medley of Naples classics and something similar to that. Link here for the whole performance that might not be shrinked down to a minute.
You’d think that from the surface principle this isn’t the absolute biggest and best performance of the entire night, when the people’s princess Angelina Mango sung a heartwrenching tribute to her late father who died roughly 10 years ago and was also a beloved entertainer, when we also had Annalisa and La Rappresentante di Lista rocking the stage with the one Eurhythmics classic, when BigMama and her girls were tearing down the patriarchy for 3-4 minutes with “Lady Marmalade”, when Rosa Linn’s Italian bestie Alfa sang a touching duet with Sanremo’s oldest winner ever at the time Roberto Vecchioni, when Mahmood also tried his hand at regional patriotism with Tenores di Bitti, when we all realized just why Santi Francesi were the winners of their X Factor because they managed to do the impossible and make people care about “Hallelujah” - arguably the most overcovered song ever - when they squeezed out the vocal talent on the rendition of the song with one of the greatest British music legends Skin... you’d think that all of these and more will be capable of placing so much better...
But the televote decided that yes, the Neapolitan medley is the greatest thing. And this whole spectacle ended up angering the “oh men will be rewarded for doing the bare minimum” crowd even harder.
This will be the one popular opinion I’d like to express, but the cover night performance of Geolier wasn’t the greatest thing of all time. It most definitely resonated with the Neapolitans, because it contained a few other streaming moguls - Guè and Luchè - and arguably the biggest Neapolitan entertainer that I’ve ever heard of, Gigi D'Alessio. And representation, once again, matters. But I thought that somehow the press and radio jury will massively overpower the televote - just like they did later in the week (spoiler alert) - and somehow it didn’t happen, and we ended up with what we ended up, and that’s why the “Neapolitans are rigging it”:
And then the superfinal/podium-only revote happened, and the press and radio juries had the upper hand (each voter in the jury being able to name sole preference out of only the 5 superfinalists when voting - and if you have heard about who won the press award during Sanremo, you’d have guessed it immediately) and used it.
There were also televote problems throughout the final, votes weren’t being confirmed, the artists themselves were posting on their social media about how is it important to keep voting them against the difficulties... easy to assume Neapolitans were jamming the landlines and mobile efficiency, but it’s not restricted to Sanremo that there are televote problems and the votes aren’t being confirmed. It happens everytime when there’s a MASSIVE surge of votes for a final.
At the end of it all, Geolier still emerged as “apparently” the most televoted act in Sanremo history.
Argue until the end of the days whether Neapolitans were the ones to rig the televote (impossible to know for certain that they’re the only ones to vote for Geolier, to assume so would be preposterous) or the press/jury were afraid of losing a woman so they tanked the man in their way (while we should’ve already known “La noia” was received better among the press than “I p’ me, tu p’ te” even as far as initially before the competition), it’s just a matter of preference from different sides, and if each side has their established favourite, good for them. Seems like no one works on the televote boost harder than Naples focusing on their most currently well known export...
Epilogue
All of this backlash definitely takes a toll on the one that the backlash is all about; just like it happened to Chanel when she won Benidorm Fest 2022 over the aforementioned Tanxugueiras - just like with Geolier “not representing” Italy and what not, Chanel was not deemed to be representative of Spain based on the 3.97% televote that she received compared to the gigantic 70%+ that her direct competitors received (while the Benidorm Fest vote rounding system was always a little awful and flawed to begin with, and as it turned out, so is the way they treat the televote, but I won’t go into detail about this on here). Chanel was bullied online, people were saying that they didn’t want her, she cried. Geolier got outright BOOED when Sanremo Cover Night results rolled in, which is not the kindest way to react to disappointment on national television when someone else ends up winning, and that of course got to him. It was the worst thing for him, in fact. Regardless, he ended up grateful for the Sanremo experience, saying that the young artists in Sanremo are protagonists (because he’s 2000-born and the winner Angelina is 2001-born), offering up to go out with the winner for a pizza, and in the end of it all he didn’t even think of winning it all (and if that happened, to loosely paraphrase his words, great, he’d be going to Eurovision!).
You may not have liked the idea of a man winning Sanremo after this long negligence of female singers, or not a huge fan of Geolier’s music as a Neapolitan or not even as a Neapolitan, but for someone who doesn’t look like he has heavily tainted his public message (otherwise he wouldn’t have come as high in the first place, right?), this furor is clearly overblown. It has always been clearly overblown, and good to know I’m not the only one thinking that. Fight the real enemies (the Neapolitans who were too blind to accept any other Sanremo outcome and might be just a tad bit worse than the worst fans of the either side of “Tattoo” and “Cha cha cha” conflict), breathe easy now that you don’t feel threatened by a “mid” song winning, and let me have my Sanremo season grieving in peace. You do you and I do me, i p’ me, tu p’ te.
