My post from a few weeks back featuring video of one Elske de Wall singing Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” in Frisian has been getting a steady stream of traffic lately thanks to Theresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden—inspiring me to share some more Netherlandish music. This time it’s Dutch supergroup The Nits (I’ve been a fan since 1982), performing “The Key Shop,” one of the trio of songs leader Henk Hofstede wrote after his Amsterdam neighbor Theo van Gogh was gunned down in 2004.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcK0ec9rzkA]
This comes after the Dutch entry yet again failed to make the finals of the Eurovision Song Festival this week. (Here’s the song. Go figure.) As I cleaned up the kitchen this morning I listened to a podcast in which the Dutch prime minister spent at least five minutes discussing whether the Eurovision debacle was indicative of the marginalization of the Netherlands in today’s Europe (his answer: no).
By the way, in that Frisian Leonard Cohen post I mentioned that the singer was a graduate of something called the Academie voor Popcultuur, a newish school in the Dutch/Frisian city of Leeuwarden where you can study to be a pop star. Well, now we’re getting a similar school in the U.S. of A., the just-about-to-open Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma. Why Central Oklahoma? It’s apparently a Flaming Lips thing.