Eurovision Song Contest: Estonian singer Tommy Cash angers Italians

DER SPIEGEL Eurovision Song Contest: Estonian singer Tommy Cash angers Italians 1 hour • 2 minutes reading time His song is anything but "grandioso" in Italy: Estonia's participant in the Eurovision Song Contest is causing outrage with his entry. Will Tommy Cash now be excluded? "Me like to fly privati ​​/ With 24 carati," rhymes Tommy Cash in his entry for the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). With these and other lines, the singer from Estonia has angered a lot of people in Italy. The 33-year-old uses a wide variety of clichés in the song "Espresso Macchiato": From spaghetti to amore to the mafia, everything is included. Now many people in Italy are outraged about the rapper (actually: Tomas Tammemets), who clearly won the preliminary round in Estonia last week. The Vice President of the Italian Senate, Gian Marco Centinaio, among others, got involved. He called for Cash to be excluded from the competition. "Anyone who insults Italy must stay away from Eurovision," demanded the MP from the right-wing Lega party. Cash sings in "terrible Italian" about someone who only got rich by drinking coffee and "sweating like a Mafioso." In the song, the singer uses a wild mixture of faulty Italian and English. Centinaio thinks: "He should come to Italy to see how decent people work before he allows himself to write such stupid songs full of clichés." And Cash? He sings: "No time to talk, scusi, my days are very busy / And I just own this little ristorante". The consumer protection association Codacons has meanwhile announced an official complaint to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). The song paints a "distorted and offensive picture" of Italy. "If songs with sexist content were excluded, wouldn't it also be appropriate to exclude a song that insults an entire culture?" On YouTube, "Espresso Macchiato" has already been viewed more than 2.3 million times. "No stresso, no stresso, no need to be depresso" - Cash swears in his song. His contribution is unlikely to earn him twelve points - at least not from Italy.