Music makes it easy to bridge generations. This was shown in the first episode of ‘Top 2000 a gogo’, presented this year by Diederik Ebbinge, who did it half clumsily and half ironically and thus managed to strike exactly the right tone. The program is not averse to melancholy and for this 25th edition the ‘generation game’ was conjured up from a hat, in which songs that were in the Top 2000 over the past 25 years had to be guessed. The pinnacle of closing the generation gap was delivered by number 676, a new entry: ‘Two moths’, by Dorus (Tom Manders) with Cor Steyn behind the organ. The unusual love song about the two moths who had found Dorus’ old coat to nest in, and who did so so sweetly (“that moth’s moth”) that they were left alone. The Netherlands at its most innocent in 1957. The fact that the number is now so high again, higher than ever before, is not due to the people who still remember that number, but to their grandchildren. They have been having fun with it on TikTok in recent months, just in the period when people could vote for the Top 2000, explained sidekick Leo Blokhuis.
“When a father has a beautiful daughter. Then there is never a moment when ‘he still lives quietly’ is from another song by Dorus that did not make the Top 2000 (the moth love song is also more beautiful), but which would have fitted well with the interview series In the best families, fathers, where Coen Verbraak talks about the role of the father. Based on an old-fashioned paradigm, namely that mothers have a more natural, more unconditional love for their children than fathers, he interviews nine fathers and their children about their mutual relationship. The first two episodes mainly featured sweet fathers, who had often struggled with their own father. Then it was about fathers with two faces, fathers who avoided conflict or had left and about proud fathers.
The need for a proud father was especially striking, call it a generational thing. It was mainly the fathers in the interviews who started talking about it: shame and pride. If Darwinism exists in father relationships, it was expressed excellently in the new generation: the children of the fathers interviewed. ‘Proud of’ was replaced by ‘love of’.
For example, journalist Frenk der Nederlanden seems like a sweet father. Not shying away from emotions and sometimes consciously seeking them out, Verbraak discusses the death of the woman of Der Nederlanden in detail. Absurd but good is the story that they had already painted the coffin and quickly put it away when his wife Sylvie returns from the hospice. She lived another year, while the coffin gathered dust in the attic. It is beautiful how his daughter Josephine still processes the grief for her mother, and what role Rosa – the Dutch daughter, with Down syndrome – takes.
A constant fear
Edwin Stolp and his son Teun are downright moving. Edwin Stolp wrote Huntington blues about the nervous disease that he was diagnosed with when his son and daughter were still young, and from which, in retrospect, his mother must also have suffered. He struggles not only with what the disease means to him, but especially with the impact it has on his children, and the constant fear of having fallen short. That was out of the question, his son thought. His daddy was someone with a disease, but that disease was not his daddy.
Teun Stolp is a son who leaves no viewer untouched in his story about and vision of his father, a lump of love and a son – there is no other way – to be proud of.