Sinemart
"You can have fun talking about your problems. Yeah, dance about your problems." -Stromae
Half Rwandan and half Belgian, Paul van Haver grew up rebelling from his classical music education in favour of hip-hop, but increasingly drew on the African music his parents played – an inversion of tradition that suits his stage name, a scramble of Maestro. “Hip-hop, pop, dance – the common point is melancholy. That’s international, and I like this word because it’s not only about sadness or happiness – it’s both at the same time. And that’s human and that’s life,” he says in a melodious tumble of accented English. “The fact that I’m coming from Belgium helps me to be like that. Because we are known to be in the middle all the time, between Flanders and Wallonia – we say in French, compromis à la Belge, compromise like a Belgian.” He says you can hear this as far back as Belgium’s 1980s new beat style: “It’s not really Afrobeat, it’s not dance music, it’s more downtempo. What kind of music is it actually? We don’t know, but we dance to it. And that’s the way I work in my music also.” Papaoutai is staggeringly powerful, as Stromae again compromises like a Belgian by palpably shifting from philosophical wondering to anger and back, all around the knotty issues of fatherhood. “I’m 28, and I have to have a baby now, in a normal way of life,” he says, implicitly acknowledging that hundreds of millions of views of his videos on YouTube mean he is far from it. “As I say in the song: everyone knows how to make babies but nobody knows how to make fathers.” Quand C’est, meanwhile, literally addresses cancer (“I talk to him: leave us, please, just go on holiday or something”) while Moules-Frites uses Belgian’s national dish as a metaphor for sexually transmitted disease, with its protagonist enjoying too many mussels – but not the kind you have with fries and mayonnaise. Stromae’s videos and live TV performances, made with graphic and fashion designers creating an aesthetic informed by MC Escher and Africa, have approached high art. For a performance of Papaoutai at a music awards show (featuring a cameo from a witless will.i.am), he adopted a cadaver stiffness with a grotesque smile, so immobile he was carried on stage like a prop; for a TV performance of Tous les Mêmes, he made one half of his head female and the other male to act out the quarrelsome couple in the song, even conducting an interview with Eurotrash’s Antoine de Caunes as the pair. “It’s about cliches in the relationship,” he explains. “Of course he’s rude, because that’s the cliche of a bad man in a relationship, but the girl is stupid also ... It’s just a fight between a man and a girl, which is lovely, beautiful – that’s love, actually.”
For the video to Formidable, he set up hidden cameras in a busy street, then acted drunk as he staggered around singing the song and attracting the attention of the starstruck police. This play-acting is the opposite to the Adele school of pop, where realness rules, and Stromae has learned it from the French greats. “Piaf, Aznavour – I’m a fan of the old generation, and the way they act on stage. Am I trying to be myself ? No, just doing my job, which is acting characters from real life. To personalise the work or think that it’s your life … Your life is not interesting – talk about a vision more than that.” He says this drama stems from intense, day-to-day shyness. “You have to express everything that you kept in all the time when you are so shy in your social life – you have to go on stage and do something totally ego trip, megalomaniac, the opposite of your everyday personality.” Back and forth he goes: shy, bold, angry, happy, sad, shy. “Who do you want to be: the radical man who can make a choice in one second, or the man who never takes decisions?” he wonders. “That’s the question: who’s the best? Actually, there is no best. I’m more the kind of man who never makes decisions. But impulsivity is not the opposite of courage; I think it’s possible to do both. Maybe I’ll find another way of doing a compromise.” Spoken like a true Belgian. Stromae’s second album Racine Carrée is out now on Universal. He plays Koko in London on 20 February as part of an 80-date European tour.
He thinks
“love is like Twitter.”
“In the opera Carmen [composer Georges Bizet] compares a bird to love. In my remix of it, I’m comparing love to the blue bird of Twitter. Like, you fall in love only for 48 hours or something, and I talk about that in my song. I’m not so radical about Twitter, but I think it’s sometimes dangerous if you think that Twitter is real life.” He hates being a celebrity.
“I think that people here are able to understand that I don’t want to be bothered. People recognize you, yes, but nobody’s crazy, nobody’s screaming. It’s really quiet. And maybe that’s why I love Brussels. Because it’s a boring city, and I’m proud of this city because it’s boring.” He thinks art is, essentially, shit. “Before music there was just art, and actually art is just bullshit. It’s so useless, you know? And next to a father, next to a baker, next to necessary jobs, you see that art isn’t really a necessity. That was a big lesson for me.” He’s not a Debbie Downer. (No, really.) “If you listen to my album, you can think that I’m depressed or suicidal, but I’m not. Music is like a medicine. I prefer to talk about my problems because my problems are a little bit exaggerated. Actually they’re our problems, our human problems, and I prefer to show instead of hide it. Everybody thinks that the only way to forget your problems is having fun, and I don’t think that’s the only way to have fun. You can have fun talking about your problems. Yeah, dance about your problems. [Laughs]”
He feels that language doesn’t matter, man. “Nobody understands English music [in Belgium], but everybody listens to English music, so we can understand the feeling, understand the groove, and it’s enough actually to dance on it or to feel.” He adores Wes Anderson. (And he looks like he could be a character from one of his movies—in the best way.) “I love how Wes Anderson shows what nonperfect people we are. Nobody is perfect in his stories. The shots are really perfect and symmetric, but nothing is perfect in the story, you know?” He scoffs at his burgeoning “voice of a generation” reputation. “I’m not so pretentious. I’m pretentious of course to sing in front of so many people like that, but not in this way. I don’t want to be a voice of a generation. I’m almost 30 and I’m just singing, that’s all. But sometimes you can think that maybe you are becoming like a genius or something, and it’s dangerous. But actually, you are just like everybody else, just trying to tell stories and that’s all. And this time, you have the attention and the support of the people, but maybe the next time you won’t have this kind of vision that people understand or want to listen to.” Stromae is known for his distinctive physique and clothing style. He has used this image in launching a limited fashion line, Mosaert (an anagram of his stage name). The collection features bright colors and geometric patterns, and has been described as “hipster” and “retro kitsch”. Stromae has said that he wanted to “create a bridge between British style and African aesthetic.” The first collection was a success, with stocks almost sold out after three days. The second collection, Capsule No. 2, was released at Colette in Paris on 3 December 2014, and features the square root design on each item in different colors.
Credits and Sources: Photographer Stephan Vanfleteren Ben Beaumont-Thomas http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/feb/19/stromae-europop-belgium By Tim Lowery Posted: Monday April 28 2014 http://www.timeout.com/newyork/music/meet-stromae-the-mostfamous-pop-star-youve-never-heard-of Magazine Designed by Sinem Ünal