Ik neem je mee

About the song

«Ik neem je mee» is the record that turned Gers Pardoel from a guest voice into a solo star. Pardoel, born Gerwin Pardoel in Nijmegen on 12 May 1981, had first reached a national audience in 2009 on «Broodje Bakpao», a novelty hit with the hip-hop duo The Opposites that went to number one on the Mega Single Top 100 and earned him a contract with the label Top Notch. Two years later he released his first solo album, «Deze wereld is van jou». Its first single, «Morgen ben ik rijk», appeared in April 2011; this was the second, and it arrived at the end of that summer.

The song was written by Pardoel with Ricardo de Rooy and Sergio van Gonter, and produced by Van Gonter under his production name Reverse. It runs a little over three and a half minutes. Its melody is borrowed, openly, from «Femme libérée», a 1984 French hit by the band Cookie Dingler. Over that melody Pardoel splits the song in two: he raps the verses in a relaxed, conversational voice and then sings a chorus simple enough for a whole school playground to join in.

The story is a love story told from childhood. The narrator remembers a girl from his class when both were eight years old, the notes he passed her, and the moment she wrote back. Ten years later they are a couple. The second verse moves to the present and to a small, very recognisable conflict: she wants ordinary things from him — to go shopping, to go out for dinner, to go to the cinema — and he is busy with music and with making money. He answers with a plan for the future that is almost a list: children, a house with a garden near the water, a pet. The chorus is the promise that holds it together: he will take her with him on a journey, and the destinations he names are two of the best-known cities in Europe.

The tone matters as much as the story. There is no drama, no betrayal and no heartbreak. It is a warm, slightly boastful young man trying to explain that he is more serious than he looks, and admitting in the same breath that the girl leaves him lost for words. That mixture of swagger and shyness goes a long way to explaining why the record reached far beyond the usual hip-hop audience, and why it gave rise to a whole family of covers and parodies within months.

For a learner of Dutch the song is a very clean A2 text. The verses are full of the simple past, both the regular kind with -de (stuurde) and the irregular kind that changes its vowel (zat, keek, kon, vroeg, zei, was, waren). The chorus is built on a separable verb, meenemen, which in a main clause splits in two and sends the particle mee to the end — the single most useful pattern to notice in the whole song. The vocabulary is everyday and concrete: school, class, notes, money, the bank, a house, a garden, a dog, a cat, the cinema. Pardoel also sings the way young Dutch people speak, and that is worth knowing: the possessive mijn is shortened to me, some final consonants are dropped, and English loanwords such as kids, fans, cool, shoppen and daten sit comfortably inside Dutch sentences. Two diminutives complete the picture — briefjes and jongentje — the small endings that make Dutch sound affectionate.