‘I want to see you naked’ was a modest request by his standards | column Maaike Borst

It was a nice song, said son on the bike home after the Kraantje Pappie concert. Good beat, nice vocals. But that text! The eight-year-old shook his head.

“That will also be on Spotify and so on, right? That’s strange!”

The latest song from Kraantje Pappie, not yet released but played live in the Oosterpoort, is called ‘I want to see you naked’. By the standards of the Groningen rapper, it is a fairly modest request. Fortunately, such a child does not yet understand the other real filth. He falls over ‘naked’.

Last year I told him what a song by his great hero was about. Sex. He looked at me with wide and somewhat suspicious eyes.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

I mumbled something about big people and how something like that is just obvious to us, difficult to explain, but he doubted my experience in this matter.

“You’re not having sex, are you?”

I looked at him in surprise and was curious about what information he based this theory on. ,,Why do you think?”

“Well, you guys never talk about that.”

The child’s brain works completely logically. Adults are the ones who make a mess of things by keeping quiet about normal things and then giggling a bit about a rapper’s lewd lyrics (or worse: getting angry about the Spring Fevers).

The children sang along to everything during Kraantje Pappie’s afternoon concert: ‘Pompen’, Slow’, ‘Drip’, ‘Spagaat’. Kraan had said sorry to the parents and had been nice to the little ones at the front. He is now also the father of a toddler (second on the way), so we as educators have decided that he is harmless.

On the bike home I already felt that I was going to get serious muscle pain from having to lift an eight-year-old for almost two hours who didn’t want to miss a glimpse of the hero, who twice pushed up his T-shirt to show his tattoos, but otherwise kept his clothes on.

At home, his son told his father that Kraantje had made a ‘very strange’ new song. He didn’t dare sing it himself, so I asked if I would do so. “I want to see you naked, baby,” I sang. “I want to see your hands in your hair, baby.” He listened to me, shaking his head and with his hands in front of his face.

“Very crazy,” his father agreed with a grin.

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