Parijs

About the song

«Parijs» is the song that made a fifty-three-year-old Surinamese reggae singer the biggest Dutch-language hit of 2015. It was released on 20 March 2015 by the Amsterdam label Top Notch, and it was written by Joost Jellema, Memru Renjaan and Kenny B himself, with Jellema and Renjaan also producing. The recording was made in 2014, and the writing happened partly in the studio and partly at home in Tilburg, the city in the south of the Netherlands where the singer lives. Kenny B has said that he thought it was still too early for him to put out a single in the Dutch market and that he had to be talked into it. The track runs three minutes and fifteen seconds.

The man behind the name is Kenneth Bron, born in Paramaribo, Suriname, on 1 November 1961. His life before music was not a musician’s life at all: he joined the Surinamese national army in 1980, rose to the rank of political commissar, and between 1989 and 1991 took part in the peace talks that ended the country’s civil war, dealing with figures such as Ronnie Brunswijk and Desi Bouterse. Only afterwards did he settle in the Netherlands and build a career in music, at first singing in English, in Sranantongo and in Aukaans, the languages of Suriname and its interior. He had real success at home in Suriname with «A sama de», but he was almost unknown to the general Dutch public. «Parijs» was only his second single in Dutch, and it changed that within weeks.

The story the song tells is small, sunny and complete. On a fresh morning in Paris the singer is going about his own business when he sees a strikingly beautiful woman walking past in high heels. He is so struck that he cannot think of anything to say, and what finally comes out of his mouth is schoolbook French: a greeting, a term of endearment, and a compliment to a mademoiselle. The joke is in her answer. She replies in French — and what she says in French is that she is Dutch, and that she only speaks a little of the language he has just tried on her. So he switches, and the chorus becomes a request: speak Dutch to me, just a little Dutch to me. He then imagines the evening they could spend together looking at the Champs-Élysées, at Notre-Dame, at the Seine and afterwards at the Eiffel Tower. In the second verse he can hardly believe his luck, watches her laugh shyly, and compares her to three famous Dutch women — the model Doutzen Kroes and the singers Edsilia Rombley and Anouk — which is the one line a foreign listener needs a footnote for. In the very last chorus the destination quietly changes: instead of climbing the Eiffel Tower, the two of them land together at Schiphol. They are going home, and they are going home together.