‘Those days of gangster rap are gone, I don’t live that life anymore. I also have to think about later, bro’

‘Everything is close by, bro!’, says Amsterdam rapper Sjaak enthusiastically on a sunny Wednesday morning. ‘The little one’s school is around the corner. My in-laws live within walking distance. And by car you are in Amsterdam within an hour. What more do you want, warrior?’

It takes some getting used to, but the exuberant Sjaak – real name Mehdi Chafi – who we visit at the beginning of March, is the same rapper who once waved an ax in a music video and swore that he ‘shit on the government’. Sjaak did that in 2007 in the song of the same name Shame on the government, a breakthrough hit for the Dutch gangster rap, which he made with Appa, another illustrious Amsterdam rapper. He has ‘nothing to lose’, Sjaak raps in his characteristic gnawing way in that song, because his life is already screwed up.

Now it is fifteen years later; Sjaak is now 36. The rapper, who asked in one of his first songs whether ‘you ever used a butterfly knife’, now leads a quiet artist life in Bathmen, an Overijssel village near Deventer. There he lives in a cozy bungalow, together with his wife Tessa, an ultrasound technician, their 5-year-old daughter Zoëy, their two rabbits (Joke and Fatima) and two dogs (Sumo and Tony).

The raw street rapper of the past has become a contented family man. He takes great pleasure in driving his daughter to swimming and riding lessons. And in his spare moments he records a stream of cheerful songs, sung in corny coal English and provided with a thick house beat.

Metamorphosis

The metamorphosis did him no harm. Where an angry rapper like Appa slowly faded into oblivion, Sjaak is still a visible artist, one with a good-humoured repertoire. Trumpetistohis penultimate song, became a platinum hit at home and abroad (25 million streams on Spotify) and, to his own relief, finally brings him close to serious recognition. Because the video clip of Trumpetisto – recorded in the Swiss Alps, in which Sjaak sings about a trumpet player who visits discotheques all over the world – has been nominated in the video category for a Edison, the most important Dutch music prize. The award ceremony will take place on Monday.

‘I’m really proud, my friend ‘, says Sjaak, who also intersperses his daily language with English. “Every year I was disappointed that I wasn’t there. But now I finally have a chance to win. That would be real appreciation.’

The most important question during the conversation: how did Sjaak manage to shake off the image of a gangster rapper and reinvent himself as a maker of cheerful club music? There is hardly any room for humor or self-relativity in the gangster rap genre. To stay relevant to their fans, gangster rappers must include in their lyrics and to live looking for the rawest edges of street life, because only then would they be ‘real’. That keeps many gangster rappers in the grip of the genre for a long time, until they are old and irrelevant, or lost forever on the fringe of society.

It could also have gone like this for Sjaak. But life threw him a few life buoys: rap talent, love, a stable family in Overijssel and an innate sense of humor. ‘I’ve always been funny and cheerful,’ says Sjaak as he walks through the garden and proudly points to the tree house and trampoline that his father-in-law installed himself. ‘But I did live the Amsterdam street life. That’s different shit, brother. I do know people from Amsterdam from the past, they now do very naughty things.’

DOP

Sjaak grew up mainly in Amsterdam-East, on and around the Boerhaaveplein, a neighborhood that was impoverished at the time, the 1990s. Because his young mother cannot take good care of him, he lives with his grandmother and uncles. His father is not in the picture. Sjaak is a rough street boy who soon gives up on his school career and alternates minor crimes with major crimes. At the age of 14, his misbehavior results in a violent street robbery, for which he has to spend some time in juvenile detention. Twelve years later, Sjaak tells in a interview with YouTuber Salaheddine that the loot from the robbery was a paltry 500 guilders, a telephone and a discman. ‘Dumb shit’ from a ‘young boy’, Sjaak looks back remorsefully.

In his criminal teens, he also discovers rap. This happens in a community center near Boerhaaveplein, where they have good recording equipment. Together with some friends from his neighbourhood, he forms the rap group DOP (Dubbel Oost Plein). They build up a small gangster rap oeuvre. In songs like 9MM – a reference to a bullet size – they grimly rap that ‘you’ll be popped in the head’ if you bother them.

Sjaak has been DOP’s most distinctive rapper from the very first song. Where the others follow a tight, monotonous rhyme scheme, Sjaak’s rap is much more playful and witty, despite the dark content. If he raps that he wants to harm someone at a weed deal, then it sounds more like a skit than a threat. The DOP numbers, usually distributed via USB sticks, quickly find their way to peers on the street and in juvenile detention centers.

Sjaak: ‘That was a good time. Then I’d be on the subway and I’d hear our songs pumping out of people’s MP3 players. It’s hard to explain how I developed my style; it’s who i am. I knew: you shouldn’t make Sinterklaas rhymes. To me it just comes out like this, wiediediewapapa, finished! Of course it took me a while to get it perfect. But you just have to keep going, you have to excel.”

Sjaak’s gangster rap with an anarchic edge also attracts the attention of the rapper Appa (the alias of Rachid El-Ghazaoui). Appa is a member of the Amsterdam rap formation THCthe founder of Dutch gangster rap. Shame on the government, the song they made together in 2007, became an outright hit (now viewed seven million times) and turned Sjaak into an instant sensation. The rapper of inimitable lyrics such as ‘I give a shit about pooplap, they think they’re wow/ I hate the blues, I eat them raw’ becomes the artist that record labels want to have under contract and with whom other rappers like to collaborate.

Sjaak serves among other things specthe management office of Ali B, and Top notch, the largest hip-hop label in the Netherlands. He appears as a guest artist on songs by the most famous rappers – from Ali b until The Opposites – and in this invariably excels as a witty daredevil who molds and bends the Dutch language at will. Particularly in his collaborations with DJs, Sjaak can show his cheerful side and rap about crocodiles that bite into women’s buttocks (crocodilewith Yellow Claw) and women shaking their ‘nana nananaa’ in the club (Brokenwith Party Squad†

Around that time, in 2012, Sjaak also gets to know Tessa. The unusual pair – he a rapper, she a veterinary medicine student – ​​met in Mallorca and also bumped into each other a few times in the Netherlands. She, a ‘horse girl’, discovers that there is a sensitive and sweet boy in the rapper. Not much later they buy a house together in Deventer.

But where things prosper in love, Sjaak’s musical career slowly comes to an end. A new generation of rappers from the Top Notch stable – Lil’ Kleine, Ronnie Flex – is ready to push the rappers of the nineties from the stage. Between 2014 and 2018, Sjaak’s bookings for performances decrease, he appears less often as a guest artist with other rappers and his administration becomes a mess. The quick money that can be earned on the street is starting to beckon again. Sjaak has arrived at a crossroads in his life.

Sjaak: ‘Booking offices said: ‘Yes, Sjakie, things aren’t going so well, are they?’ That hurt my heart. I was often with my cousin in Brabant. It went well with him. He was doing beautiful things on the street, if you know what I mean. The temptation was great to also make a bang. But my wife said: either you choose me and your music or it’s over. She still believed in me.’

Baking pancakes

In Deventer, and later in Bathmen, Sjaak lets go of the last remnants of his Amsterdam gangster rap image and opts fully for his clownish side. This results in a relaxed artist who mainly wants to have fun with melodic club songs and funny video clips. This new Sjaak is clearly visible for the first time in the number Step-by-step from 2018 that he makes with DJ Kav Verhouzer. The song makes it to eleventh position in the top-100. In the video clip we see an artist who has gained a lot of weight, wearing a floral shirt and slippers. Under the pounding tones of a heavy house beat, with a drink in his hands, he whips up a group of retirees.

Also in the songs he makes afterwards, fun is paramount and he raps just as easily on a tractor to a house beat (tractor) as about romantic getaways in Paris (Ce soir† Sjaak becomes a character: a partying family man in rural Bathmen who no longer has anything to prove on the streets of Amsterdam. in the number The village from 2021, an ode to Bathmen, he sings how much he likes the village and homely life and raps: ‘As a little boy I never thought I would be here / But now that I’m here I feel oh so good’.

This is also proven by the vlogs he has been keeping on his YouTube channel since 2020 Scarf TV. Thereupon he regularly keeps the viewers informed about his fitness regime and the ponies he keeps around the bungalow, and he bakes pancakes with his daughter Zoëy or he gives classic fairy tales a new look with titles such as Chickie Princess Snow White†

‘I want to win everyone’s heart’, says Sjaak about his transformation. ‘Black, white – I have love for everyone. That time of gangster rap is gone, I don’t live that life anymore. Sure, hip-hop is still in my heart, but I’m also thinking about later, bro. With the music I make now, I have created an opening for a much larger and international audience. Trumpetisto is played in South Africa, Brazil, Sweden, even fucking Russia. I have to take that chance. And if you want gangster rap from me, just listen to my old songs, I’ve made enough.’

Sjaak – who currently releases his work at Sony – already has a new song in the pipeline. He is so enthusiastic about the production that he can’t resist playing an unfinished version on his phone. The title is the year 1701† Grinning, he sketches the video clip he has in mind for the song: men with white wigs and powdered faces, highwaymen, a carriage, a baroque dance hall, the tinkling of harps. And then suddenly a house beat sounds and Sjaak appears to rap in that typical coal English about champagne, caviar and everything else luxurious consumed in an 18th-century court.

Hopefully the song is a ‘world hit’ in the making, says Sjaak while letting his head sway to the beat. He envisions the sequel after launch: performances all over the world, from Tokyo to Los Angeles. But don’t stress if it doesn’t work out. ‘I live peacefully here. And I do what I like. That is the most important.’