‘Uncool Grammar’: lo-fi pop punks revive Dutch answer to Dada | music

IImagine a song about the bustling center of Amsterdam magically turning into chocolate, prompting children to eat it wildly. Then the edifice dissolves once you take the train from Amsterdam Lillylan to Haarlemmermeer. This is a story Amsterdam opens the chocolate van (“Amsterdam Suddenly Became Chocolate”), a song written by a young alternative pop musician, Thor Keesing. It is an example of the cheeky and rebellious side of 20th century Dutch popular culture. Ludic (“Fun”), which may be on the rise again.

Kissing is a central character in a new project that attempts to capture what Ludic Meaning music in the 21st century: two compilation albums called Nieuwe Nederlandse Naïviteit (“New Dutch Naïviteit”), promoting a disparate group of Dutch-speaking contemporary pop artists. In October 2024, the first volume was launched at a Spartan Youth Center in a remote suburb of Zaandam. The second volume is scheduled to be released next March in “modern” Amsterdam.

The music in both groups varies greatly: from groovy electro-pop to 90s alternative rock and Cure-like post-punk. Flemish sound artist Lila Maria de Coninck participated in the 2024 launch and performs the latest collection as part of the duo Welnu. She loves the “fun and imagination” in music that is “sometimes not well thought out,” but “challenges how music and language should look and work.” De Koninck cites artists including Nick Hickman, Miriam Hochberg, and Joris Ahn, who have created colorful, self-paced worlds on the margins of pop music.

Many of the songs are simple and direct in character. Even when introspective, they boast a Promethean “throwback” quality. The mystery of footballer Johan Cruyff Elk Nadel Hip Zone Fordeal (“Every flaw has its advantages”) echoes in the soul in the chatter of Domtwig and Lucky Fonz III, Alain Verloren (Get to Work) (“All is lost, start again”), or in Amsterdam, by Zaandam band Tupperwr3. Their paean to a city with good transport links, a highly educated population and menus with “pictures of meals next to each dish!” may be gently ironic but goes against the popular consensus that Amsterdam is an unpleasantly overcrowded and expensive place to live.

The historical roots of Ludic This concept is found in a 1938 work titled “Homo Ludens,” by Dutch academic Johan Huizinga, who saw play as the key to human social development. Ludic It first revolutionized Dutch public consciousness with the anarchist Provo protest movement of the 1960s, and over the following decades, attacked mainstream Dutch society. Art and performance served as one channel: for example, cultural agitator Wim T. Schippers made massive public sculptures out of excrement. Television was another program that produced such as “The Absurd.” Jeskivitor the children’s program Erasus, which tells fictional stories using gossip culture.

If there is a specifically “Dutch” character Ludicit can be a fun and versatile kind of fun. Her plays do not seek to impose stronger political criticism, unlike similar European counterparts such as Monty Python or Dada. However trite, Ludic It usually presents concepts about more inclusive and acceptable ways of life.

The organizer behind Nieuwe Nederlandse Naïviteit It’s Joost Wemhoff. Wemhoff, a likable man in his 50s, works with “tough teenagers” in pre-vocational secondary education. He also sings in Tupperwr3. We meet for coffee in Zaandam. He speaks warmly about LudicThe history and character of Amsterdam, the “dirty, noisy and smelly” of the early 1980s, where, as a boy, he witnessed the explosion of punk. What stuck in Weemhoff’s head was a rallying call: We create our own world (“We will create our own world”).

Most of the new generation of artists are young, white, middle-class and progressive in outlook. But they also like to think about things that don’t suit an increasingly homogeneous country. Wemhoff saw an eclecticism in their work that presented broader ideas of independence and freedom. But most of all, Wimhof wanted Nieuwe Nederlandse Naïviteit to move away from the “norms of behaviour”, such as the “masculine pretentiousness” that he finds so prevalent in the Dutch music industry. He is keen for the project to remain “modest and democratic” in nature, and acknowledges a strong Dutch Protestant character to his project, from which he has not gained “a penny”.

The Protestant character that Wemhof mentions also evokes the Dutch poem of social decorum: Du Mar Jeon, Wes Mar Jeon Gislev (“Just act normal, just be yourself”) suggesting that singing in Dutch is not a bad thing: an idea that goes against prevailing popular wisdom. Wemhoff asks: “Why? He should Are you singing in English these days?” He argues that the Dutch pop music scene has always contained an unspoken “gratitude” to our American liberators, reinforced by a constant thirst for Anglo-American musical trends. It follows that it was easy for the Dutch actor to sing in English.

“And there’s something very pretentious about that idea,” Wemhoff says. . “If you sing in Dutch, you have to be poetic, like Baudouin de Groot, or sentimental, or even corny. But your music will never be ‘really cool’ or international, like the British or the Americans.”

Uncool rules, now? It can seem like that. Portbahr singer Jaco Wiener (who usually wears a “homemade magic robe”) will urge his young peers to “respect our veterans!” Kwartet Niek Hilkmann sings about the difficulties in maintaining public allotments. Others point to aspects of everyday life such as gloomy weather, coffee breaks at work, or, in the case of Miriam Hochberg’s splenic path, Antiochbilid (“No Smoking Policy”) explains the growing frustration she finds at not being able to smoke cigarettes in public. The disappearance of signs of life on Dutch streets, such as Snoep-in tabakswinkel(sweet and cigarette shop) or local chin. Industrial specifications. Convenience (Chinese takeaway) sometimes appears in promotional materials.

Does this music reflect a form of disaffected, even reactionary, nostalgia? The theme and aesthetic sometimes echo the catchy phrase: Froeger was the best ever (“Everything was better before”), which has current connotations with protests – often right-wing in nature – against unaccountable governments, farmers’ rights, and asylum seekers. But as Wemhoff is keen to point out, sometimes things were better: they also reflected a more tolerant and progressive mood. His experiences as a primary school teacher in the 1990s coincided with the gradual loss of the broad-based education that younger children were receiving, which included craft, arts, and social responsibility lessons. “Now, there’s none of that left: just grade-oriented material,” he says.

Weemhoff feels that the country has become steenrijk (“Filthy Rich”), but also somewhat intolerant in outlook. He wants the crudeness of the Nieuwe Nederlandse Naïviteit project to repurpose the Dutch rebellion for more progressive goals. For example, Jaco Wiener’s magical donning of a cape and sloganeering directly echoes Robert Jasper Grootfeld’s shocking antics in the early 1960s. At the album’s launch party, we saw Teonte, a boy in a skeleton suit, singing: “You’ve got cancer in your legs from nuclear weapons” against a sad soundtrack played by his parents Konstranen (“Tears of Art”). It was silly, Dutch, naive and daring: a perfect example of modernism Ludic As a touchstone for a more expressive, questioning, and inclusive individuality.