Naked Monkey on Evolutionary Street

MAY 15 2017 · 12:00

Francesco Gabbani · "Occidentali's Karma" · Italy · 2017 Placement: 6th · Language: Italian · Composers: Francesco Gabbani, Filippo Gabbani, Fabio Ilacqua, Luca Chiaravalli · Venue: International Exhibition Centre · Host: Kyiv, Ukraine · Type: performance innovation · Broadcast: HD On the night of 13 May 2017, at the International Exhibition Centre in Kyiv, a forty-two-year-old Italian singer-songwriter in a grey t-shirt shared the stage with a dancer in a full-body gorilla suit and spent three minutes pulling off one of the strangest Eurovision favorites of the decade. Francesco Gabbani had already won Sanremo in February with 'Occidentali's Karma,' a song built almost entirely out of quotations — yoga-studio vocabulary, a 'namaste, namaste ahi' chorus, a Desmond Morris reference ('la scimmia nuda balla,' the naked ape dances), a key-change cribbed from the Italian cantautori of the 1970s. The gorilla had first appeared in the Sanremo staging as a joke about evolutionary kitsch; by Eurovision week the gorilla was on betting markets, on meme feeds, on breakfast television in half of Europe. Gabbani was the pre-contest favorite for weeks. On the night itself, the performance — clean, warm, deliberately unslick — hit the Kyiv stage with a slight Italian-television flatness the televote audience did not fully reward. Salvador Sobral won with 'Amar pelos dois,' and Gabbani finished sixth. But the sixth-place slot hid a larger shift: 'Occidentali's Karma' became the most-streamed Italian song of the year and arguably the single most memeable Eurovision moment of the late 2010s. Context 2017 was Italy's sixth year since returning to the contest, and the country had been trying to convert Sanremo wins into Eurovision victories. 'Occidentali's Karma' was different from the usual Italian Eurovision export — it was a joke wrapped around a serious pop song, with a chorus designed to stick after one listen. The Kyiv contest itself was overshadowed by Ukraine-Russia geopolitics: Russia had withdrawn over a travel-ban dispute involving its artist Yulia Samoylova, and the staging production was reportedly more chaotic than any host run in a decade. Against that backdrop, Gabbani's gorilla segment was read, in Italian press especially, as a reminder that Eurovision could still function as a songwriters' contest. Legacy The song became a touchstone for the Italian Sanremo-Eurovision pipeline that Mahmood, Måneskin, and Marco Mengoni later built on. The gorilla-dancer staging became a reference point in Eurovision production meetings for years — 'remember the gorilla' became shorthand for strong visual hooks that do not depend on pyrotechnics. Gabbani himself returned to Sanremo in 2020 as a more established star, and 'Occidentali's Karma' continues to be one of the most-viewed Eurovision Song Contest channel uploads of the 2010s. Mythology Many remember 'Occidentali's Karma' as having won Eurovision; it did not — it finished sixth. The gorilla is also often misremembered as Gabbani himself in the suit; the dancer was a separate performer. The song's lyrics are also often read as straightforward celebration of yoga and eastern spirituality — Gabbani has said in interviews they are, more precisely, a satire of westerners treating those traditions as aesthetic accessories.