Sophie Straat Fights Gentrification With Folk Music

On a recent Saturday night, the Dutch singer Sophie Straat took the stage before a raucous crowd at Garage Noord, a sweaty Amsterdam club. “Tonight is about a lot of things, but it’s especially about gentrification,” she said as she launched into “Groen Amsterdam” (“Green Amsterdam”) her ironic song about being priced out of the city.

The crowd — largely female, young and Dutch-speaking — danced as the singer, dressed in a leather skirt bearing the words “no fun,” sang about the expensive cargo bikes that have become a fixture of Amsterdam’s increasingly wealthy central neighborhoods. “You watch how I took over the city,” Straat sang in Dutch, adopting the persona of a gentrifying newcomer. “It’s not my fault the bakery is closing.”

Straat, 30, has gained a following in the Netherlands in recent years for modernizing a genre of folk music known as smartlap, with punk and pop sounds and lyrics about inequality and gentrification. It has made her a voice for a generation of young Amsterdammers fed up with a city they see as increasingly expensive and homogenized.

“I was attracted to her music because it was in Dutch, then I realized it was about not being able to find a place to live — which is exactly what’s happening to me,” said Zoë Schaap, 35, a bartender attending the concert. “The music sounds old-fashioned, but it has a real vibe about what is going on right now.”