A Short History of Dutch Music - Part 2

With the great success of 'Eelrock' in the 60s and 70s, Holland was ready to create a second genre and add it to its Musical Heritage. We're talking early 80s and the concept of 'Nederpop' is invented. Musically at least as renewing as the 'Eelrock' genre, Nederpop arrived with a bang with a band called 'Doe Maar' (freely translates to 'Go on, make my day, I don't mind either way, so you might as well go ahead with it, but do understand that you won't get my complete support, simply because I don't care). It's a concise language, Dutch.


Doe Maar brought a ska-ish, reggae music to the Dutch public. Combining typically Dutch subject matter (drugs, television, eternal doom, existential crises, and of course the secret love for your night nurse), the colours of the early 80s (bright pink and an incredibly hurtful shade of neon-green) and a combination of boyish good looks with a naïve desire to make 'adult music', the band was clearly destined for stardom. Teen stardom, that is. And that's exactly what they got. But obviously, Holland being Holland, teen stardom literally meant 'barely teen stardom'. With the average age of the Doe Maar fans being estimated at 12, before people knew it Dutch Society was facing its worst crisis since the war against Spain in the late 1500s.

What happened? A couple of things. Firstly, Doe Maar had figured that writing words with numbers instead of letters would be a nice trade mark. You know, writing the word 'for' as '4' and making all kinds of clever combinations like that. Exactly, this is where Prince got the idea. Problem was that kids all over Holland, in the middle of learning how to spell correctly, figured that one day, this way of spelling might come in handy when trying to squeeze a message of 500 characters into a space limited messaging method. How wrong could they be…

Secondly, all 10-14 year old girls in Holland fell in love with Doe Maar overnight. This resulted in a World Record of 'mass-lovesickness' still unsurpassed in the History of the World. Take That tried to beat the record when they broke up, but didn't even come close.

Parents were worried, teachers were worried, eye doctors were worried (because of the abundance of bright pink and hyper reflective green that all of a sudden appeared everywhere), even Doe Maar themselves were worried. After all, they were serious musicians, trying to be taken seriously and here they were giving concerts to people being dropped off by their parents at 6 and who had to be back in bed by 8.

So they did what any self-respecting serious band would do when faced with the burden of teen stardom. They called it quits. By doing so, they literally broke up with millions of teens. It was heart breaking. If you think the news of Take That breaking up (now, where do you think they got that idea in the first place?) was the saddest moment in music history, you should have seen the aftermath of the Doe Maar break-up. A generation scarred.

Of course, there were many Dutch groups that had bravely tried to surf the Nederpop wave that Doe Maar created. Some had some success, but after the Doe Maar break-up the momentum was instantly gone. A few groups tried desperately to recreate the feeling, but with over a million teenage girls in public mourning, there was simply no market for any Dutch pop music anymore… …for a long long time.