Hip Hop in Hamsterland

“You dance like it’s hip hop no matter what song is playing.”

As I was getting ready to move to Amsterdam from New York, despite all the overthinking I did, I didn’t once think about the fact that I would have some version of this exact conversation at least once a week.

As a pint-sized blonde haired blue eyed chick born to a fresh-off-the-boat Italian mother and Jewish father on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I’m not what anybody would describe on first look as ratchet. My wardrobe is more A.P.C. than HBA and even though I worship at any temple Kanye builds — INCLUDING 808s and Yeezus and I’m not sorry — I’ve got a lot more in common with Jon Caramanica than Ricky Rozay (shout out to all the pear).

In New York, that makes me pretty average. Any bar near where I lived in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn guarantees a steady mix of U.S. Top 40, lots of which is hip hop, R&B or remixes of hip hop and R&B.

And yet in Amsterdam, a major part of my experience has been reconciling my identity not as an American abroad, but as a chick who “loves hip hop”, which is how my Dutch friends usually introduce me at parties.

The first time somebody called me out for “dancing urban” I laughed so hard I spat out my drink. As I regained my composure and looked around me at the 6am scene of Dutch kids two-stepping feverishly in that super distinct techno-meets-I’ve-been-chewing-ecstasy-pills-for-the-last-9-hours kind of way, I realized that here, in the context of this Amsterdam warehouse rave, she was kind of right.

I guess it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock that moving to the country that exports most of the world’s MDMA as well as most of today’s most popular EDM artists (Tiësto, Armin Van Buren, Fedde Le Grande, Afrojack, to name a few, are all Dutch) results in nightlife that revolves largely around electronic music.

And yet despite the fact that most of the parties I’ve gone to in The Netherlands feel like they’re pulled straight out of a Stefon from SNL sketch with loosely counter-cultural political themes that often have a dress code — some recent themes include Uniformity, a uniform party, Genesis 6.6 where you were meant to dress as ‘an extravagant fantasy creature’ apparently as a rebuttal to a bible passage, or the one festival I wound up at where the theme was just “tent” — I’m the one who consistently gets called out for being different.

The funny thing is, when I got over the fact that hip hop here is a subculture, not mainstream culture, I realized it’s kind of awesome. It means when I find other people here who love it, we become friends immediately.

We search for the parties that play the music we like, share links to the latest mixtapes, scream the Maybach Music, Mustard on the Beat Ho, & DJ Khaled drops over techno drops, and they laugh twice as hard when I tell them about the time a colleague and I had to explain to a Budweiser client who’d worked on the Bud Light Ritas what THOT Juice meant.

In a country where the term culture shock doesn’t even begin to do justice to the dissonance between America & Holland, hip hop has been one of the least likely and most substantial connection points for some of the best friendships I’ve made.

Or maybe I’m just happy the parties that play the music I like don’t have themes. Apparently leather jackets don’t qualify as “tent”.