Traag

About the song

«Traag» — the Dutch word for slow — is a club track by the Amersfoort rapper and producer Bizzey, recorded with the rappers Jozo and Kraantje Pappie and released on 12 May 2017 on the Noah’s Ark label. It was produced by Ramiks and Bizzey, and the writing credits go to Leo Roelandschap, Alex van der Zouwen, Stephan Boers and Jordi Teze. Musically it is nederhop, Dutch-language hip-hop, built on the rhythms of Brazilian baile funk and the Caribbean dembow beat that also drives reggaeton. It became one of the most-watched and most-streamed Dutch-language recordings of all time, and it did so almost entirely outside the traditional hit parade.

Bizzey is Leendert «Leo» Roelandschap, born in Amersfoort on 11 May 1989 to a Dutch father and a Surinamese mother; his father ran a record shop in the town. In 2010 he co-founded the DJ and production group Yellow Claw, which grew out of club nights in Amsterdam, and in 2016 he left it to work on his own as a rapper and producer. Kraantje Pappie is Alex van der Zouwen, born on 1 July 1986 in Rozenburg near Rotterdam, of Dutch and Moluccan descent, who went to school in the north of the country and launched his career by winning the Before the Fame Awards in Groningen in 2007; his debut album «Crane» (2012) was produced with the Groningen trio Noisia. Jozo is Jordi Teze, born in Rotterdam on 10 September 1995, who came to attention in 2015 with a session on the 101Barz platform and then signed with the label Rotjoch United.

The song is a dance-floor record and its lyrics are built for the club, not for the page. A female voice sings a short, repeated hook asking for everything to be done slowly and low, and the three rappers answer with a stream of dance instructions and flirtatious compliments. The lyrics are explicit and suggestive, and that is part of how the track was received: as a party song, with a monotone, hypnotic chorus that people sing along to without paying much attention to the verses. The female voice was never credited. In 2025 the singer Marloes Pieksma, who performs as Oes, revealed on TikTok that it was hers, and explained that she had accepted a one-off payment instead of royalties.

For a learner of Dutch the card is useful for one reason above all: it is made almost entirely of commands. The Dutch imperative is simply the stem of the verb, with no ending and no subject, and the song uses a long row of them — do, feel, pull, put, give, let, throw, shake, call. Several of those verbs are separable, so the order splits the verb in two and sends the small particle to the end of the clause, which is the feature that most confuses speakers of Romance languages. The song also shows the future with zullen in an inverted order, a set of direction words for up and down, English loanwords such as body and face slotted into Dutch sentences, and a reduced pronoun of the kind that spoken Dutch uses all the time. The vocabulary is small and repeated, which makes it easy to follow once the grammar is clear.