Roffa Goddam! Negotiating memories of injustice in the soundtrack of the Dutch Black Lives Matter movement

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement spread across the Atlantic. Dutch activists embraced the US movement’s cultural material, incorporating Nina Simone covers and American rap quotes. New music produced to accompany the Dutch protests referenced historical and contemporary US racism. Critics labeled this reliance on US-American memories ‘Americanization’. But musical material produced in the Dutch BLM movement also addressed local concerns, and artists integrated American influences with personal, locally specific reflections. This article explores the implications of the ways in which the soundtrack of the Dutch BLM movement employed memories of US-American racism and resistance. Paying attention to lyrics as well as music, and combining memory studies, social movement studies, and Black Atlantic scholarship, it examines how songs that were (re)produced in the Dutch BLM movement integrated Dutch and US memories of discrimination and resistance into new ‘memoryscapes’ and narratives. The article thus reveals how activists use protest songs to connect past to present and region to region to produce new, politically functional narratives.