Despacio flashback: Tarzan Is Nen Bliken

Still buzzing from last weekend’s Despacio at Wintercircus in Gent, there are lots of tracks that keep spinning in my head.

One of the more peculiar songs played on Sunday was a track called ‘Tarzan Es Nen Bliken’. When this funky track was played, my friend Kristof and I tried to understand the lyrics and a quick google search learned that this track was by an artist called Gust.

Non-Flemish people at Despacio probably didn’t get the fact that the track was sung in a Ghent accent and how absurd and funny the lyrics are.

Just a quick translation of a few lines:

Tarzan in America
Tarzan in the cinema
Tarzan on a bike
Tarzan on a photograph
Bieze Beize Boaze Buize
Tarzan Is A White Guy

A funny song, with an interesting story:


So the singer, Gust Buysse, was an intriguing guy who started breaking World Records during the Gentse Feesten in the late 70s. In ’78 he broke the record of ‘scraping carrots’ by doing this for 10 days straight, over 225 hours at 100 kilograms of carrots a day. Five years later, in 1983, he wrote a letter to US president Ronald Reagan to express his concerns about the US government. The letter was 10 kilometers (!) long, had the width of 1 meter and weight over 350 kilograms. These are just two examples of the shenanigans this guy was up to.

In ’85 he wrote a novel called ‘Es Tarzan Wel Nen Blieken?’ (‘Is Tarzan Really A White Guy?’), and again during the Gentse Feesten he autographed his own novel for 10 days straight, 18 hours a day.
This was also the inspiration for the single ‘Tarzan Is Nen Bliken’, which could be heard at Despacio almost forty years later!


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