The starting point of my writing

I was a very shy, young teenager – and I fell for the toughest people I had ever seen: rappers, preferably from America. That love in itself was not spectacular: I was born in 1990 and so my high school years coincided with the rise of commercial hip-hop. TMF and MTV were on day in, day out, showing images of hard-edged gangsta rap. But the extent to which I fell for the genre was more extreme than that of any of my classmates. I obsessively followed dozens of rappers, built up a huge CD collection, started blogging about hip-hop at the age of fourteen (the starting point of my writing). I also dissected the rap lyrics, sentence by sentence, searching for all the slang unknown to me.

Explicit language

They were often rough, sometimes downright crude tracks, full of the n-word and explicit swearing. The world sketched in that music was in every way separate from the environment in which I grew up. And it was precisely that realisation that deepened my love. My childhood took place in Amsterdam-Zuid, a neat and very privileged district, where everything was well organised and where the days became somewhat monotonous. Hip-hop made me feel for the first time what art is capable of, because through the music I suddenly got a clear view of other lives, of slums on the other side of the world where the days were full of discrimination, poverty, inequality and danger. I wanted to understand that world, or maybe I just wanted to expand my own universe a little. For years, I listened with concentration every day to the songs that sometimes consisted of ingenious and grim short stories about people who had been ignored all their lives, who had never been listened to – and you could hear that in their voices: the anger, the fire.

Tour vans

And I kept writing about the music, eventually not only in reviews. From the age of sixteen or seventeen, I wrote to every American artist who performed in the Netherlands. My stroke of luck was that social media didn’t exist yet: very regularly a rapper thought he would benefit from an interview, and so I often found myself stepping into chic hotel rooms with my cassette recorder, dressing rooms that smelled of weed, or crowded tour vans.