When there is a fifth Friday in the month, Ton Maas is present in Acoustic Moods. Everytime, he receives a guest from the music world and talks with them in the light of their favourite music. For this time our guest is journalist, publicist, reviewer, music centipede and DJ Stan Rijven (The Hague, 1949).
Stan Rijven has done so much during his career, that it’s almost impossible to name everything here. It is one hell of a job for Ton Maas to highlight all features within the hour, let alone to broadcast as much as possible of Stan’s music, which he brought with him. But both Ton and Stan are eager, so they’ll simply start and see what follows!
The keynote for the past forty years of the life of Stan Rijven has been his passion for popular music. Since 1979 he reported about the pop world with respective distance in the daily newspaper Trouw a.o. He also published in both domestic and foreign magazines about a broad range of topics, varying from ‘youth culture’, ‘Band Aid’ and ‘Pop photography’ to making analyses of stars such as Julio Iglesias and, as co-author, about Madonna. Afterwards, ‘Pop file Madonna’ (1987) appeared to be the first serious analyses about this phenomenon worldwide.
Pop music represents to him both low and high culture, both vital entertainment and a cultural field which deserves serious attention. He organized for instance the first pop congress in the Netherlands (in Paradiso, Amsterdam, 1984), was co-founder of the first pop archive in the world (Liverpool, 1987) and in the Netherlands (PAN, 1989) and was co-creator of the first exposition on Dutch pop history (Museon – The Hague, 1991).
Western and non-Western pop is viewed by Stan Rijven as coordinating in stead of subordinate. To him they reflect two sides of the same medal, with which he puts the 20th century popular music into one big globalization process. He also remained active for forty years as an allround DJ, who, against the wind, mixed together half a century of dance music. He played at Book balls, student and company parties, and was the owner of his own club Ritmundo for two years (1995-1997). Between all dance trends in, his exclusive style with the label ‘eclectic big city cocktail’ still became a trend.
Nowadays Stan can be heard with his ‘Radio Ritmundo’ on Upradio on a weekly basis.
Ladies and gentlemen, here we have: Ton Maas and Stan Rijven with, as Stan defines it himself: Moois met Maas!
