Joost Klein, born in Britsum, will represent the Netherlands in the Eurovision Song Contest. In 2015, the ‘Leeuwarder Courant’ interviewed him when he was still 17 years old and known only as EenhoornJoost.
A corny Frisian student is currently the rising star on YouTube. Meet Joost. UnicornJoost.
‘Yo gangsters, whaddup, Joost here!” A boy appears on the screen whose blond hair has been pushed aside with one swipe of gel. He looks euphoric.
No, seriously. Or wait, now feral again; In the space of a few seconds, Joost has conjured up at least five or six expressions on his face. His large eyebrows dance impetuously, almost adrift, above his eyes.
Typical Joost Klein. Or better said: typical EenhoornJoost. Because EenhoornJoost – without the space after ‘Eenhoorn’ – is the alter ego under which the seventeen-year-old Frisian high school student manifests himself on the YouTube video site. Joost’s star is rising rapidly. Earlier this year, renowned internet video makers declared him a major YouTube talent at the table with Humberto Tan in RTL Late Night. Nearly 88,000 fans have already subscribed to his videos.
Youth idol
Every day, hundreds of enthusiasts, especially teenagers, devour Joost’s videos on their smartphones and tablets, lying in bed, hanging on the couch or secretly in class. Far from regular television and other traditional media channels. Joost is a youth idol in a parallel world.
Every now and then that adoration surfaces, when well-known You-Tubers in inner cities come together with their audiences on special occasions. Then Joost hands out dozens of autographs, has himself photographed and his viewers want a joke or a kind word. Sometimes they give him presents, as if he were a pop star. He finds those moments bizarre. “I hope you never get used to it, because let’s be honest: this is anything but normal.”
What makes EenhoornJoost’s footage so wildly popular? It is difficult for the student to put his finger on it. A YouTuber like Bas van Velzen, known on the internet as ‘vvbasvv’ and a good friend of Joost, is famous for the videos in which he takes unparalleled free kicks. But the native of Leeuwarden says he does not have such a specific trademark.
One moment he’s dancing like crazy in his underpants in the snow, the next he’s doing a corny quiz in front of the camera with his girlfriend Isa. “It’s all very random, very random. I never write out the videos in advance.” He also doesn’t have a fixed publication schedule. “That would kill my creativity.”
An average of six hours of assembly
Yet his YouTube expressions have a common denominator. They’re fast, silly and slick. Joost’s videos of no more than a few minutes are the result of an average of six hours of editing. Then he just wants to make it “a masterpiece frame by frame”, without giving in to what his audience or – even worse – commercial parties would like to see.
That stubbornness is ingrained. When he grew up as a non-Frisian-speaking boy in Britsum, he was sometimes bullied. “I was always a little different. One of those internet kids with long hair. I watched a lot of English TV and didn’t participate in neighborhood parties.” And when other children said something about it, Joost showed himself to be quite smart. “I had a big mouth. That didn’t really help.”
The freedom of YouTube fascinated him immensely from a very young age. The fact that people worldwide could see what he had created with his camera at his own discretion: fantastic. Joost’s first video can be found in the depths of YouTube: an adorable ten-year-old boy with a long mane, dancing in front of the webcam. It earned him a total of seven likes.
‘I think I made my parents proud’
Joost also learned early on that anyone who sticks their neck out on the internet is an easy target for dirt spouts.
YouTubers receive a lot of “hate”, from innocent insults to death curses, often from anonymous commenters. Humor is Joost’s shield. “I just try to respond to it in a comical way.”
The virtual audience figure is still happy that he did not bend the knee to web vandals at the time. YouTube became much more than a stage for his creative excesses. The Internet provided an outlet after Joost lost both his father (cancer) and his mother (cardiac arrest) in the space of about a year at the beginning of his puberty.
“Unconsciously, YouTube has become the thing in which I process that.” In one of his most viewed videos, Draw my life , he talks openly about it and exposes his past to the world with a laugh and a tear. “You could say that my backpack is very heavy,” he concludes at the end of the video, and then urges his viewers to “always keep going.” no matter what .”
Father Klein didn’t like the first videos of his youngest child, Joost admits. But his parents should see his success now. “I think I would have made them very proud.”