Angelina Mango – The girl
(Angelina Mango/Dario Fine/Madame)
Italy will be represented in the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 by a girl who sings a carefree dance song about love, with a Latin-like hook in it. However? Almost. Her name is Angelina Mango and she indeed sings a danceable song, but the song is not about love but about another feeling, namely: The girl, or: boredom. How exactly does that work?
The girl
The song is sung from the perspective of a girl pursuing a singing career. But that girl is not in control. It is lived by others, by the patriarchy, by men. One such man offers her a song:
I don’t want to bore you, but I have a love song here and someone has to sing it.
The girl complains internally:
I die without dying
in these worn out days
I live without suffering
but she takes it, I close my eyes and sign the contracts. And she even cherishes the crown of thorns that she is given – one of the many references in the text to the church – because suffering is at least something experienced.
All this is sung – and that is the ironic twist – by a young woman who could very well have been this girl in terms of age (young), voice (squeaky clean) and appearance (fresh), singing about love in a light-hearted melody. But who is she really?
A live performance of the song Orodoor Giuseppe Mango, in 2009.
Mango
Angelina comes from a musical family. Her mother, Laura Valente, was the singer of Matia Bazar; she joined the band in 1990, so after their Eurovision participation (1979) and after their mega hit I hear you (1985). Her father, Giuseppe Mango (or simply Mango), was a beloved singer in Italy, known for hits such as Oro (1986) in The swallow (2002). Angelina was born in the village of Lagonegro in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, like her father.
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In an interview from 2014, Giuseppe Mango reflects on his youth: ‘When I was six or seven years old I was already happily participating with my older brother Michele, who had a cover band of which I was the mascot. And I sang Aretha Franklin, The Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, James Brown, Led Zeppelin, everything that was international.” And Angelina was also already making music at the age of six. She then wrote her first song, inspired by her older brother Filippo, who was in a musical production. ‘I wanted that too! And I took a piece of paper and wrote that I was fed up with all the men in my life, and I decided, you know what? I fall in love with myself, I marry myself, I make my own life.’ She followed her father in her dream.
fate
On December 7, 2014, Giuseppe Mango will perform in Policoro (near the family’s hometown), during a benefit evening for children from Guinea-Bissau. He takes the stage at midnight, in front of four thousand people, including his daughter Angelina, then thirteen years old. Giuseppe sings Oro, one of his most famous songs, and the stadium takes over, singing it to him while he’s not feeling well – he becomes unwell, excuses himself and is led away by emergency workers to encouraging applause, out of everyone’s sight. There his condition turns out to be serious: a heart attack. He dies before reaching the hospital.
x 2
During the funeral, Giovanni, Giuseppe’s older brother, does not feel well – he also becomes unwell: a heart attack. He is also taken to hospital and dies on the spot. The other brothers, Michele (that brother who had raised Giuseppe musically) and Armando, have just arrived at the hospital to visit Giovanni. They don’t feel well – so do they! – and are admitted to the same hospital but later discharged without consequences.
Interruption
Angelina drops out of high school.
In 2016, the remaining family moved to Milan, her mother’s birthplace. There she resumes her school, but she has difficulty keeping up. ‘I could only participate for two hours at the most, then I called home. I don’t want to sit in a closed room with other people, where it is even decided for you when you have breakfast and lunch.’ She just wants to be able to ‘act crazy’. At the same time, she starts performing with her older brother, who asks her to be a singer in his cover band. This is the start of her own musical career following in her father’s footsteps.
Fidelity
She sometimes thinks about whether she has remained true to her roots. ‘My father was born in Lagonegro and he wanted to start a family in the house where he grew up. Basilicata (the region) is a unique place, quite gloomy at times, melancholic and I can feel those roots. But I won’t betray him if I stay in Milan for more than a year, because that’s also my home and I’ve lived there for seven years and my mother is from there.’ She concludes the reflection with, “The real roots are tied to values, not places.”
Angelina Mango – We’ll think about it tomorrow (2023)
Values
And she explores those values in her music. In 2023 there will be – after participating in the popular TV talent show Amici – her first hit single, We’ll think about it tomorrow (‘We will think about it tomorrow’). “It’s about allowing myself to procrastinate. The other day I spent the whole afternoon on the couch, dead, and I ordered myself to surrender to that moment, to forgive myself.’
Heavy and light
Her lyrics are often about feelings of heaviness that happen to her – unrest, fear, boredom – and which she then explores in a light-hearted way, because the music often sounds light, also in the follow-up single Etc (‘And so forth’). About the meaning of this song, she says: ‘I came out of a TV show and people recognized me at the gas station. And then I suddenly thought: what if this is no longer the case in a year’s time? What if this stops, this flow of love towards me? I am also sometimes afraid that I cannot find depth. That I know a little about many things but not everything about one thing, because I don’t manage to really dive into it, perhaps due to laziness or lack of time, and that scares me.’
Angelina Mango’s live performance van The girl during the San Remo final.
Sanremo
Where her father once shone just before his breakthrough in the eighties, Angelina shines this year: in San Remo, the Italian music festival of which the number one goes to the Eurovision Song Contest. As ‘daughter of’ she pays tribute to Giuseppe; she sings his hit there The swallow. “It’s fair, he deserves it,” she says in an interview. Then she just does her own thing again and sings The girl.
Back to The girl
Because she doesn’t want to be placed somewhere, she wants to be able to act crazy. And so she sings the story of the girl who skips along to the rhythm of the cumbia created by men. Because you can dance very wildly to this Colombian type of dance, ‘and if I take the risk of stumbling, at least I’ll stop being bored.’
Photo copyright: Andrea Bianchera
Italy is co-founder of the festival, not least because it is still wildly popular festival van San Remo served as an example for the first Eurovision edition in 1956. Often, but not always, the winners of that San Remo festival were designated as participants for the Eurovision Song Contest. Italy has not been a loyal participant: in the eighties and nineties the country was absent from half of the editions, and in the new millennium the Italians only joined again in 2011 (but immediately came second again). There was a profit in 2021 with the band Måneskin with them Shut up and good and before that in 1990 (with Together: 1992 by Toto Cutugno) and especially in 1964, when the Italian singer Gigliola Cinquetti, after singing her I’m not old enough received applause for so long that she had to come back a second time to bow again – a unique event in Eurovision history.
Sources:
- Angelina Mango, the interview: love, the strength of women and Sanremo 2024 | Vanity Fair Italy
