Representing Interfaith Love in Seamin Tapi Tak Seiman: A Peircean Semiotic Analysis

Interfaith relationships remain a socially and emotionally complex issue in Indonesia, where love often collides with religious boundaries. Despite the prominence of interfaith themes in popular culture, few studies have examined how such tensions are represented semiotically through audiovisual media. Addressing this gap, the present research analyzes Petrus Mahendra’s lyric video “Seamin Tapi Tak Seiman” using Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotic model to explore how signs convey meanings of interfaith love, conflict, and moral negotiation. A qualitative descriptive approach was employed through transcription, coding, and interpretation of selected lyrical and visual segments. The findings reveal that qualisigns (emotive phrases), sinsigns (symbolic acts), and legisigns (ritual practices) express struggles between affection and doctrine. Interpretants emerge as emotional empathy, moral reflection, and acceptance, showing how audiences may internalize interfaith dilemmas through music. The study contributes a novel perspective by extending Peircean semiotics into the moral and cultural domain of popular music, demonstrating how audiovisual texts mediate intersections of love, belief, and identity in Indonesia’s plural society.