Francesco Gabbani

Francesco Gabbani: The Gorilla Who Conquered Sanremo

A man in a monkey suit dancing behind a pop singer is not, on its face, a formula for the fastest-selling single in Italian chart history. But when Francesco Gabbani took the stage at the 2017 Sanremo Music Festival with a dancer costumed as Desmond Morris's "naked ape," Italy fell instantly and completely for "Occidentali's Karma" — a song that name-checks Buddha, Heraclitus and Karl Marx and still became the most-viewed Italian music video of the year.

A Late-Blooming Songwriter

Born September 9, 1982, Gabbani built his career the unglamorous way, working as a multi-instrumentalist proficient on vocals, guitar, piano, bass and drums long before mainstream recognition arrived. He got his first professional credit in 2009, featured on Mira Leon's single "Filodoro," and released his own debut singles, "Estate" and "Maledetto amore," in 2011. His first studio album, the wordplay-titled *Greitist Iz*, followed in 2014 — a modest start for a musician who was already well into his thirties. The turning point came in 2015, when he signed with BMG Rights Management, a deal that gave his career the infrastructure it had lacked.

Two Sanremos, Back to Back

Gabbani's ascent through Italy's most storied song contest was unusually fast. In 2016 he won the Newcomers' section of the Sanremo Music Festival with "Amen," a song that also picked up the Mia Martini Critics' Award for lyrical quality. The following year he returned and won the festival's main competition outright with "Occidentali's Karma," making him the first performer in Sanremo's history to win both the newcomers' section and the main competition in consecutive years — a feat that instantly made him one of Italian pop's most talked-about figures.

The Song and the Suit

"Occidentali's Karma" is a stranger record than its chart success suggests. Gabbani has described it as "a sarcastic reflection on the clumsy attempt we Westerners make to seek serenity through Eastern disciplines," built on a dense scaffold of references he has confirmed as deliberate — Buddha, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and his doctrine of flux, Marx's line about religion as "the opiate of the masses" reworked into a jab at internet addiction, the zoologist Desmond Morris and his book *The Naked Ape*, and Shakespeare's *Hamlet*. Onstage, that argument was embodied by choreographer Filippo Ranaldi, who performed a gorilla dance in a full ape costume that Gabbani credited as instrumental to the win, jokingly dubbing him "the monkeygrapher." The costume and the choreography went viral within days, spun off merchandise, and turned a song about the shallowness of Western wellness culture into the very kind of viral internet sensation it was satirizing — an irony Italian commentators did not fail to notice.

Breaking Italian Chart Records

The commercial numbers were extraordinary by any standard: "Occidentali's Karma" became the fastest-selling song in Italian chart history, went gold within a week of release and platinum within two, and was eventually certified platinum six times over, representing more than 300,000 units sold. Its music video set a record for the most Vevo views in a single day in Italy, at 4.35 million, and it became the first Eurovision-associated song ever to pass 100 million YouTube views. Morris himself, whose book had directly inspired the record, praised "the precision and sophistication of the lyrics," comparing them to Bob Dylan and John Lennon, while the philosopher Gianni Vattimo likened the song's playful erudition to the novelist Umberto Eco.

Eurovision's Favorite That Wasn't

Riding that wave, Gabbani represented Italy at the Eurovision Song Contest 2017 in Kyiv, where betting odds shortened dramatically from 66/1 to 6/1 after his Sanremo win, making him the pre-contest favorite. On the night, however, he finished sixth with 334 points, a result that triggered a wave of memes and conspiracy theories in the Italian press, including speculation that a BBC tweet had swayed the vote. Gabbani took the anticlimax in stride, joking afterward that being the favorite may have worked against him and that he preferred confounding expectations. He did walk away with the contest's Marcel Bezçnon Award for best press entry, and the song's lasting cultural footprint arguably outstripped its scoreboard finish: it holds the distinction of being the first Eurovision entry to include Sanskrit lyrics and only the second ever to include Ancient Greek.

A Career Beyond One Song

Gabbani did not become a one-hit act. His 2017 album *Magellano* reached number one on the Italian albums chart, and he followed it with *Viceversa* (2020), *Volevamo solo essere felici* (2022) and *Dalla tua parte* (2025). He returned to Sanremo in 2025 with "Viva la vita," placing eighth, and that same year took on a mentoring role on the nineteenth season of Italy's *X Factor* — a sign of a musician who has settled into the role of established industry figure rather than one-time novelty.

Why Francesco Is Called a Genius

The word "genius" attaches to Gabbani less for raw musical innovation than for a specific, unusual skill: compressing genuine philosophical and literary erudition — Heraclitus, Marx, Shakespeare, evolutionary anthropology — into a three-minute pop song catchy enough to become the fastest-selling single in Italian history. That is a songwriting and pop-craft achievement, not evidence of scholarly originality; Gabbani himself has been modest about the references, confirming only a handful as deliberate and letting critics find the rest. The strongest outside endorsement came from Desmond Morris, the scientist whose own book supplied the record's central metaphor, who compared the lyric-writing to Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and from philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who likened its wit to Umberto Eco — serious names lending serious praise to what is, at bottom, a novelty hit built around a man in a gorilla suit. The honest counter-case is obvious: the song's global fame rests as much on a viral dance costume as on any lyric, Gabbani finished only sixth at Eurovision despite being the runaway favorite, and nothing in his catalogue since has matched that single moment of cultural saturation. What the "genius" label really honors is the improbable trick of making satire about shallow spirituality into the very kind of shallow viral phenomenon it mocked, without the joke curdling — a needle threaded, deliberately or not, with real craft.

Legacy

A decade on, "Occidentali's Karma" remains shorthand in Italy for a certain kind of infectious, referential pop, and the gorilla dance has outlived the news cycle that created it, still surfacing at Italian weddings and parties. Gabbani's subsequent chart-topping albums and his move into mentoring a new generation on *X Factor* suggest an artist who converted one viral moment into a durable career, even if none of what followed has matched the singular strangeness of a song about Eastern spirituality that made an ape suit into a symbol of Western contradiction.

Achievements

• Instruments: guitar, piano and drum
• Genres: synth-pop and indie pop