Willem de Bruin (38) sits under a staircase in a broom cupboard in the basement of Paradiso, where it is ‘quiet’. He wears a blue and black striped sweater with the word Carribbean on it. “Must represent my roots, right,” he laughs. Willem, once known as Willy from the successful rap duo The Opposites, is tired but in a great mood. Spit of God, his second solo album, has just been released, the first show of the tour is sold out and has just been sound checked. The calm before the storm, a moment of peace. “I’m fine, man. Really good. Of course, there is some healthy tension, but that is part of it.”
Perhaps that tension is also there because of the high expectations. In 2018, four years after the break with Twan ‘Big2’ van Steenhoven, Willem released his debut album Man in Need out. A deeply felt, cuttingly emotional album about the anxiety and depression he suffered after the end of The Opposites. The rave reviews were not to be missed and the radio program continued 3for12 declared his work the album of the year.
“The Willy from the rag songs of The Opposites still exists, just like the Willem of today. They coexist, just as everything can coexist. People are like water. You can always start over.” He did that: he played the leading role in the film Catabomb (2018) and the performance Spit of God was his theater debut in 2022. “That’s why I don’t want to talk about who I am, but about what I feel. That’s more powerful. You are nothing, you are simply given an identity.” After Man in Need he was called ‘the Dutch Kanye’ by some media. “Why can’t I just be Willem?” he laughs with shrugged shoulders.
A lifelong search summarized in one question. Willem grew up in the village of Noordeinde, where he suffered a lot from discrimination as a “brown boy”. As a boy with “double blood”, he was not brown enough to belong to the Antilleans, where his father’s roots lie. This conflict pulls the carriage of his artistic existence like two wild horses. And they cannot be tamed, so he embraces them. For example, he sings on ‘Like Water’: ‘I am winner and loser/ my enemy and hero/ the cause, the effect.’
Jumping, rocking, stage diving
This duality also returns on ‘Bloed Zien’, where he raps that he is the identity crisis of the Netherlands incarnate. “Our country needs relationship therapy. We have to get to work, find out who we actually are. I come from the Netherlands and Curaçao, where I also partly live. I have that conflict in me, you know. I then wonder, what is that, what does that mean, what does that do to you? This identity crisis arises because we do not want to recognize who we are as a country.”
Spit of God is therefore both a personal album full of questions and a committed work that broadens the questions. “I don’t have any answers.” Here too, Willem bases his lyrics on important themes such as identity, masculinity and loneliness. Yet the music is a lot more energetic than his debut. “I didn’t want to do the same thing again. I don’t just want to sing ballads. I want to jump, rock, stage dive. That is the fire in me.”
The intriguingly well-produced album (by Morien van der Tang (Morgan Avenue), Ramiks and Jheynner) is full of catchy guitar riffs, soft rock, breakbeats and hard hip-hop. Without lyrics, the album could easily pass as the sequel to Man in Need. A man who found lifebuoys and left the rough sea. But it is the other way around, says Willem: “Spit of God is actually a prequel to Man in Need. It’s the way to it. Energy, chaos, pent up anger. I asked myself: How do you get to such a point? In such a deep valley? And what does it mean to be a man there? Father, son?”
angry boy
As a father of two children aged eight and nine, as a son and as a loved one, he now wants to take responsibility for himself. Just like five years ago, this album was a birth. “I screamed a few times that I’m quitting, that I’m never going to make music again. People around me have suffered from this. I can no longer just be that angry boy who had all those bad experiences. The next album may still be grating, but it no longer has to be such a deep valley that I have to go through. The music needs to eat away at me less. Maybe a little more confidence in myself, and a little less ego. So that there is just a little more laughter.”
That sounds like a triptych, with prequel and sequel. “In fact, there is already a new album that is almost finished. Spit of God would actually be 18 tracks long. I really had the motivation and ambition to release them all, but due to the pressure of the deadline and perfectionism, it was better to split it in two. That was exciting for a while, and I had to get through it. But the people around me made the decision, also so as not to have to wait another five years for the next album. I just needed that.” How long then? “I don’t know, but I’ll get to work right away after this.”
Then he falls silent for a moment. “I’m looking at your hand now. Quite by accident. You have a domino tattooed, and those dots are a central theme in the album’s artwork. Life is one big coincidence. A game of chance. That’s why Spit of God, in Papiamentu ‘Skupi de Dios’: birthmark. No one determines where you have moles, that’s a coincidence. I have a large one on my face, which has always made me stand out and shaped me. And besides: the Dutch association with Spit of God is negative, a kind of sacrilege, while that is not the case in Curaçao. That conflict again. So around the clock,” he winks.