It was 2017, my first Christmas in the Netherlands – my first Christmas away from my home in Leicester, UK. I had only lived in the country for two months, having moved to Amsterdam with my ex-girlfriend who was Dutch. We were at her parents’ house in Den Haag on Christmas Day and the Top 2000 on NPO Radio 2 was playing in the background.
Traditionally in the UK, certainly in my house, Christmas morning was spent opening presents with the TV on in the background, and drinking bucks’ fizz in pyjamas. If the radio was on, it would probably be playing festive favourites like The Pogues ‘Fairytale of New York’, or, God forbid, Mariah Carey’s abominable ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’
However, as we were listening to the Top 2000, there was of course no curation to what was playing; it was just whatever was next in the list. And at that particular time, the next song on the list was ‘Rape Me’ by Nirvana. Now, as good as the song is, I think it is fair to say it is not exactly Christmassy. But such being the weird and wonderful nature of the Top 2000, this was the soundtrack to my first Kerstmis.
The Top 2000 began as a one-off event to mark the millennium with the Dutch public voting for its 2000 favourite songs. The songs were played 24 hours a day between Christmas to New Year, with the final song timed to end exactly at midnight on New Year’s Eve. The winning song, in a truly shocking surprise, was Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’
The vote and the subsequent radio programmes were so successful that the Top 2000 has become a cemented part of 21st-century Dutch Christmas tradition. Hundreds of thousands of Dutch people vote every year and in 2024 6.9 million people listened to at least some of the radio broadcast.
The chosen music, certainly the top 100, is mostly classic rock from the 60s and 70s, which has led to some criticism about the lack of diversity in genre, gender and race. Of the 25 editions so far, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ has reigned supreme with 21 wins. The only time a Dutch-language artist was voted top was in 2020 when ‘Roller Coaster’ by Danny Vera won.
When I voted for the first time in 2017, I tried to game the system by voting for tracks less popular in the Netherlands but obviously much better than what gets into the top 10. So I like to think my vote for Pulp’s ‘Common People’ pushed the song over the edge and into position 1,966 or ‘Lovesong’ by The Cure into 1,916, helping it finish above the horror of Enrique Iglesias’ ‘My Hero’ at 1,931.
So while much of the music is tedious dad rock; and if you were to listen to the top 100 you might be fooled into thinking that hip-hop, jazz or electronic music doesn’t exist, I do find real joy in the Top 2000. We live in such a fragmented world; we’re all an endless line of individuals siphoned off into our own tiny corners of an algorithm hell constructed by billionaire sub-Bond villains. Isn’t it nice to have something left of the monocultural past? Just some tiny fleck of cultural life that we can experience as a cohesive cultural mass?
Perhaps I’m just an old man yelling at tulip-shaped clouds. But while the Top 2000 is hardly a revolutionary concept, in 2025 the very idea of something wholesome being consumed by a culture as one seems radical.
Written by James Turrell