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Blijven slapen — Snelle: Dutch vocabulary & story · Verbomatico

Blijven slapen

by Snelle & Maan

Language: Dutch
Released: 2021
Genre: nederpop
Level: B1
Difficulty score: 800
Duration: 2:51

How to study this song

The card for “Blijven slapen” is built from 77 study entries at B1: 20 Dutch words, 26 adjectives and 31 verb forms. The glossary is the place to begin — dag, date and gangen are the song’s keywords. It is unusually descriptive — 26 adjectives alongside 20 everyday words — so expect colour rather than plot. At this level part of the list will already be familiar; the rest is what closes the gap.

The words of this song, in several languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

NL	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	DE
dag	day	día	giorno	jour	dia	Tag

Adjectives

NL	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	DE
alleen	alone, only	solos, a solas	da soli	seuls	sozinhos	allein, nur

Verb forms

NL	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	DE
doe	I do	hago	faccio	je fais	faço	ich tue

What this song teaches you

Level · B1

Vocabulary words: 20
Adjectives: 26
Word combos: 7
Expressions: 10
Verb forms: 31
Quiz questions: 35

Background

About the song

«Blijven slapen» arrived on 26 February 2021, in the middle of a Dutch winter in which the clubs were shut and nobody was going on dates at all, and it proceeded to sit at the top of the Nederlandse Top 40 for ten straight weeks. It pairs two performers who were already famous separately and who had never made a record together. Snelle is Lars Sebastiaan Bos, born in Deventer on 3 October 1995 and raised in the Gelderland village of Gorssel; his stage name is the Dutch word for the fast one, and he had been rapping since his teens before breaking through nationally in 2019. Maan is Maan de Steenwinkel, born in Utrecht on 10 February 1997, who won the sixth season of The Voice of Holland in 2016 and who in 2019 became the first winner of that programme to put a single at number one on the Top 40. Between them they covered most of the Dutch pop audience, and the record was built to use that.

The song was written at Snelle’s house by the two singers together with Arno Krabman, Okke Punt and Delano Ruitenbach, and produced by Krabman with Jimmy Huru. The melody did not come out of the writing session at all: Snelle has said he had already worked it out in the shower the day before, which is the sort of origin story that sounds like an anecdote and is in fact a good description of how the tune behaves. It is short, it loops, and it is the kind of line that fixes itself in a listener’s head on first hearing. The finished track runs two minutes and fifty seconds, which is barely longer than a radio jingle, and it is built on a light disco pulse rather than on a trap beat — one of the reasons it travelled so far outside the usual rap audience.

The structure is the real point of interest, and it is worth explaining because it is what makes the record work as a teaching object as much as a hit. The song is a conversation between two registers. Maan sings the framing sections in sung, melodic, fully articulated Dutch: a woman getting ready for an evening out, second-guessing the dress, worrying she left too early, wondering how late the last train runs, wondering whether the person she is meeting is right for her at all. Then Snelle takes a verse and the whole texture changes. His part is rapped, fast, and written in the Dutch people actually speak rather than the Dutch that is written down — pronouns shrink, words fuse, and the line lands on the beat instead of on the grammar. Putting a rapped verse inside a pop song was not new in 2021, but the two halves here are unusually well matched: the same words come back in both, which lets the listener hear the same vocabulary twice, once sung slowly and once spoken fast.

Did you know?

The melody was not written in the studio. Snelle has said in interviews that it came to him in the shower the day before the writing session, and that he and Maan then put the song together at his house with the three other credited writers. The pair had known each other for a while and had talked about working together; this was the first time they did.

The video went up the same day the single did. It stages the date the song describes, with the two performers and a group of dancers, and it ends with a cameo that only makes sense to a Dutch audience: the television presenter Chantal Janzen turns up in a bed on the beach and joins the dancing. Janzen spent years fronting an RTL 4 programme built on the same idea as the song title — she would stay the night at a celebrity’s house — so the appearance is a joke about the title rather than a guest spot.

That video became the second most-watched music video in the Netherlands in 2021, which for a Dutch-language record is an unusual position to reach in a year dominated by international releases.

The song is the meeting point of two very different career paths. Maan came out of a televised singing competition in 2016 and had to prove she was more than that; Snelle came up through Nederhop and had to prove he could carry a pop melody. The record settled both arguments at once.

It belongs to two albums rather than one. It appeared on Snelle’s fourth album, «Lars», released on 13 March 2021 — a fifteen-track record that went straight to number one on the Dutch Album Top 100 and reached number four on the Flemish Ultratop 200, with five of its songs already out as singles — and then again on Maan’s «Leven» in 2022.

The title is an ordinary, unglamorous piece of Dutch. The verb blijven means to stay and slapen means to sleep, and put together they are what anyone would say about spending the night at someone else’s place. The song gets its whole effect from using the plainest possible phrase for something the singers never state outright.

Snelle’s stage name means the fast one, and he has explained it as a reference to how quickly alcohol affects him rather than to anything about his rapping. Maan performs under her own first name, which is also the Dutch word for the moon.

A Netflix documentary about Snelle premiered in April 2021, in the same weeks the single was sitting at number one — so the film arrived with the biggest hit of his career playing on every Dutch radio station behind it.