Staged Prinsengracht fight goes viral for Dutch musician

A short clip filmed for the single “Sukkel in Amsterdam” has been watched more than 14 million times on Instagram in under two days, and a good share of the people watching it believe they are seeing a real argument.

The singer and impressionist Menzo Kortland posted the fragment on Monday evening. In it, two women appear to be shouting up at a man in a house on the Prinsengracht while a passer-by, who had nothing to do with any of it, walks into the shot and reacts to what he is seeing.

By Wednesday morning the counter had passed 14 million. Kortland has said it already stood at 3.5 million when he woke the morning after posting, and that the first wave of viewers was almost entirely Dutch before it spread further.

The row is staged, and not everyone can tell

The argument was set up for the music video, which came out about two months ago. Kortland tagged the post as a sketch in his own caption.

It has not helped much: the clip has drawn around a thousand comments, and they run from people declaring it fake and criticising the acting to people genuinely angry with him for filming what they take to be a real fight and putting it online.

That confusion is a good part of why it has travelled. Reactions have come from the United States, Italy, France, Japan and the Dominican Republic.

By his own account it is the unscripted responses of the real passers-by that make the fragment work, because they do not know what they have walked into.

The song behind it

Sukkel in Amsterdam is a mild complaint about the city, sung from the position of someone who stays at home in Woudrichem while the attention goes elsewhere.

Kortland has described it as a joke with something bitter underneath: performers based in Amsterdam draw people to the city, and the song belongs to the one left behind.

He had the fragment sitting on his phone for a long time without doing anything with it, and only decided to put it out this week.

A bigger reach than anything before it

His previous viral moment was an impression of Gerard Joling, which reached roughly a million views and stayed largely inside the Netherlands. This is a different order of thing.

Kortland left his job as an editor at SBS Shownieuws earlier this year to work on music full time, and says he hopes the attention turns into bookings. Nothing has come in from the Dominican Republic yet.

Source: Algemeen Dagblad