Jean-Paul De Coster

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Jean-Paul De Coster is a Belgian producer and songwriter from Antwerp. Together with his fellow Antwerp native Phil Wilde, he made dance music in the early 1990s in their own studio. Their first collaboration appeared under the name Bizz Nizz, with the single Don't Miss the Party Line, which reached the top 10 in England. It whetted their appetite for more.

Music and breakthrough

In May 1991 De Coster and Wilde made an instrumental track, Get Ready for This, which became a club hit. They asked the Dutch rapper Ray Slijngaard to put a rap on it. He came back with a tape on which Anita Doth, an acquaintance from the Amsterdam nightlife scene, also sang. That is how 2 Unlimited came about. De Coster and Wilde wrote and produced the music on the Belgian label Byte Records. After Get Ready for This came Twilight Zone (1992), No Limit and Tribal Dance (1993) and The Real Thing (1994). The albums Get Ready!, No Limits! and Real Things were great successes all over Europe. When Ray and Anita left in 1996, De Coster and Wilde looked for new female singers, because they held the rights to the name.

Influence

De Coster's music was Eurodance: fast beats, hard synthesizer riffs, short raps and a singalong chorus that keeps coming back. British critics found it too simple, but the crowds in clubs and at sporting events did not. De Coster shows how in dance music the producers are often the real creators, while the public mostly knows the faces on stage. In 2012 he began working with Ray and Anita again.

Listening

In School of Rock

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• Mixtape 13: From Cassette to Cloud^NL Reader

Mentioned in other articles

• No Limit SongThe music came from the Belgian producers Phil Wilde and Jean-Paul De Coster.