“Come to me quickly, I need you,” says a girl to her friend, both about seventeen, when Joost Klein starts one of his last songs, ‘Florida 2009’. They listen to the emotional song about the death of his parents, sung with a large Frisian flag over his head, arm in arm.
By then they have had a good hour of it, during which emotions flared up considerably. At a concert by the YouTuber, rapper, singer and musician from Leeuwarden, fists are raised in the air as often as hearts formed with fingers. Anger, powerlessness, sadness, euphoric happiness are very close together in Joost, who turns 26 next week.
That is where Joost’s strength lies: he organizes an evening where you can dance all your muscles to techno, ska, gabber, guitar riffs and happy hardcore, but at the same time it is public therapy. “Me and all my tears fill full halls/ I have a lot of stories, I’m full of questions,” he raps in ‘Waiting Music’, while the lights flash and the beats fly fast and hard around your ears. “His name is small but his dream is big,” you hear in ‘Droom Groot’. It’s equal parts insecurity and bravado.
Bulky income
Still, it didn’t start off that strong. Support act Donny Ronny, an alter ego of Gover Meit (formerly Stefano Keizers) performed an incomprehensible, off-key karaoke show. Joost then immediately jumped in with his ‘Uncle Robert’, in which he shouted in one voice: “Suck my dick, bitch!” chanted. That was quite a bit of income, even though it did get them moving right away.
There were also imperfections that weighed more heavily. For example, asking for a mosh pit is already a weakness, because if the music is energetic enough for a mosh pit, one will arise, right? But he not only asked, it was also displayed large on the screen as a handy clue: ‘Open the mosh pit’ – nice and spontaneous. Also not well thought out was the excellent dancer for a few numbers, dressed as Michael Jackson, who danced lost across the stage, without much relation to the show. And the ‘German part of the evening’ would have been a lot more convincing if Joost had given it a little more substance than just his German summer hit ‘Friesenjung’ with Berlin companion Ski Aggu, and one and a half corny songs as a supposedly German artist. It is a half-baked play that was not well developed and therefore not very funny, although the idea was nice.
They are sometimes a bit loose, unfinished ideas that are easy to forgive when, like Joost, you have shot into the stratosphere in a short time. He had never given such a big show – with the exception of the extra show the night before. And thanks to his real emotions, enthusiasm and hit sensitivity, the bottom line was a deeply felt show with strong festival energy, which hit the party animals and misfits just as hard.