ABSTRACT
This article studies the content of the winning songs in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), and then compares it with the content of the winning songs at the OTI Song Festival. Each song revolves around the emotions and desires of a symbolic personage, construed as the “musical person”, that expresses a tension between two sets of opposing optional values, namely: positive values (e. g. high self-esteem, gratitude, care, respect, consideration, wisdom, heart, soul, love, peace) versus negative values (e. g. low self-esteem, ingratitude, carelessness, disrespect, ignorance, bias, heartlessness, soullessness, hate, war). This semantic opposition operating in the songs is typically addressed through the construction of a new ideal personage, the “moral fourth person”, committed to defend human dignity and fraternity. The transition between the musical person and the moral fourth person occurs with the introduction of three fundamental ethical values, which are not optional, but prescriptive: goodness, solidarity, and reciprocity. The winning songs in ESC and OTI offer a precious cultural text that turns out to be very useful for various fields of academic knowledge, both semantic studies, as well as pragmatic, discursive, and literary theories, ethnology, musical theory, sociology of the spectacle, political culture, and social psychology.
