Europapa
Joost Klein
When did «Europapa» come out?
«Europapa» came out on 29 February 2024 as the Dutch entry for Eurovision in Malmö. It is a happy hardcore track by Joost Klein that celebrates Europe’s open borders.
How to study this song
Learning “Europapa” means 70 entries at B1+ — 25 Dutch words, 16 adjectives and 29 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Start with the glossary: benen, Berlijn and bus come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. It is unusually descriptive — 16 adjectives alongside 25 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| benen | legs | piernas | gambe | jambes | pernas | Beine |
| Berlijn | Berlin | Berlín | Berlino | Berlin | Berlim | Berlin |
| bus | bus | autobús | autobus | bus | autocarro | Bus |
| dag | day | día | giorno | jour |
What this song teaches you
Level · B1+
- Vocabulary words
- 25
- Adjectives
- 16
- Word combos
- 8
- Expressions
- 20
- Verb forms
- 29
- Quiz questions
- 35
More Dutch songs at this level
Background
About the song
«Europapa» was released on 29 February 2024 as the Dutch entry for that year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, and within days it had become the most talked-about song of the competition. It is a two-minute-forty burst of happy hardcore, the fast, bright, deliberately cheerful dance music that filled Dutch raves in the 1990s, and it was built by people who know that sound from the inside: the music is credited to Paul Elstak, one of the pioneers of the genre, together with Teun de Kruif (who works as Tantu Beats), Thijmen Melissant and Dylan van Dael, and the words to Joost Klein with Donny Ellerström and Tim Haars. Elstak and De Kruif produced it.
Joost Klein was born in Leeuwarden on 10 November 1997 and grew up in Britsum, a village in Friesland. He started out as a teenage YouTuber in 2010, making sketches and short documentaries under the name EenhoornJoost, before moving into music. By 2024 he was already well known in Germany as well as at home, after «Friesenjung», a 2023 collaboration with Ski Aggu and Otto Waalkes, went to number one there. Behind the playful persona there is a hard biography: his father died of cancer when Joost was a boy, and his mother died about a year later, in 2011. He was brought up after that by his older brother and sister, and the loss runs through much of his songwriting.
That is the key to «Europapa». On the surface it is a travel song: a young man with no money and a missing passport who decides to see Europe anyway, by bus and by train, without needing a visa, relying on his imagination where his wallet fails. It celebrates the open borders of the Schengen area and throws in snatches of several European languages along the way. Underneath, the title gives the game away. «Europapa» is Europe plus papa, and «pa» is the everyday Dutch word for dad. The song is a letter to his father, and it is written so that the celebration and the grief sit side by side instead of cancelling each other out.
The clearest sign of that double meaning is a musical quotation. At one point the singer switches on the radio and hears Stromae’s «Papaoutai», the 2013 hit by the Belgian artist whose title asks where papa is and which deals with an absent father. Then, after the last chorus, the beat drops out altogether. In a quiet closing section the singer stops addressing Europe and speaks to his father, recalling something his father once told him about the world and its borders, and telling him that he listened. The rave, it turns out, was a way of carrying out a father’s advice.