Both pop sensation Antoon and his frenzied audience explode with pure joy of life ★★★★☆

Although every cultural entrepreneur has his own corona story: no artist will have received the pandemic as raw as the Hoorn singer and pop hit writer Antoon. Valentijn Antoon Verkerk, his full name, was discovered by the rapper and music teacher Twan van Steenhoven alias Big2 as a very talented student at the Herman Brood Academy.

Antoon got the right nudges, and in 2020 his first songs became hits in the stream lists and on TikTok. hyperventilation became the Dutch pop song for a young to young adult audience that likes to sing along with not too complicated lines of poetry such as: ‘That chick wants a relationship, but I don’t have the time for that’.

Antoon subsequently wrote hits on the assembly line, often provided with his own beats and an unerring sense of what is fun and fresh now. Songs in which the word ‘party’ occurs excessively and in which light down rap is alternated with danceable electro pop and even chunky dance. A perfect mix for pop that explodes with zest for life, with which the up-and-coming sensation could have done good business on stages and in festival tents. But when it came time to harvest, corona scorched Antoon’s field.

sing-along hits

He kept the flame well lit. This month, right after the pop sector’s revival, he came up with two new sing-along hits: Hey and Hotel school† And now he is still selling out the biggest pop venues: the Utrecht Ronda is stormed on Saturday by a mass of young people who can no longer be stopped. Well then, it’s still possible: Antoon is now two years older (19) and so are his fans.

It is no wonder that the hall explodes completely for an hour and a half. Antoon’s party music works great in a room full of adrenaline: the audience hosts and sings along to the rear balcony. The repertoire is made for it: songs like dance floor are horribly catchy, and the lyrics are overly confident but also cunningly ironic: ‘Nothing can stop me, it’s in my blood’, he sings. “I’m the king of the dance floor.” Then with a hangover in class on Monday morning.

His tracks are full of indelible catchphrases, all aimed at a maximum dance response: ‘It might just fit, in my single bed.’ He rams his hits out at a fast pace, sometimes a bit too hastily. Once a chorus has been sung along once, it’s already time for the next cracker. The unbelievable thing is that Antoon has been able to make so many carefree youth anthems in such a short time. And that he completely relaxes his oeuvre, as if he had never done anything else, finishing it in front of an ecstatic audience that refuses to catch its breath. After two years of misery, both the artist and his yearning audience get what they deserve.