June 19, 2014 3:00 AM ET
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Paul Van Haver, better recognizable as Stromae, has rather than captured the European music belt-tightening exercise. Now, he's setting his sights on the U.S.Dati Bendo/Courtesy of the artist
Paul Van Haver meets me in the urban cafe of a Brussels arts average. Even though he's one of the newest young pop artists in Europe, he arrives with just his manager, not an entourage. Van Haver is soft-spoken and deftly pure, with total, caramel-colored scrape and sunlit immature eyes. Young people inside the cafe gawk agog in advance approaching him for an marker. They judge him by his stage name, Stromae - "skillful" in backwards French jargon.
Stromae's latest hit, "Papaoutai," swept the French music awards this year and went to the top of the iTunes singles charts in aloof than a dozen countries. The coating has been viewed aloof than 150 million times. Not bad for a trivial song about a boy's flawlessness budding up without his edge, whose title translates as, "Papa, where are you?"
Stromae's edge was a Rwandan initiator who wasn't unevenly much; he died in that country's genocide in 1994. The composer was raised, nap with four siblings, by their Belgian mother in a popular Brussels village.
"I didn't judge him very well," he says. "My unrest is to judge that I will never judge who he was. It was difficult to judge he was late. But to the same extent my mother told me, I held, 'What's a father?' cause I don't physically judge what a edge is."
Stromae says he grew up listening to French and American rappers, and was motivated by the Americans' pulse and flow, but not their look on of life.
"I didn't understand this smooth of fake look-in," he says. "As if life is about swimming pools, limousines, stripped girls and stuff. No, my mother told me that happiness is not that, you know?"
His mother sent him to a JESUIT theoretical at 16, some time ago he substandard out of the urban system. It was a rotating point for the artist: He resolute to get cool about his life and his music, which he describes as a mix of Congolese salsa, rap, French ballad and electro-pop. The songs are about the world he grew up in.
"I point out to talk about our problems, to be high-ceilinged of them, in place of trying to stow them. In the function of you can't. And I point out to dance, to smile on it, to taunt on it," he says.
Stromae's first hit, "Alors On Danse" ("So We Cavort"), took Belgium by twister in late 2009, followed by all of Europe a few months last. It may be about leave of absence, divorce and proposition, but it makes you want to dance.
"I resolute to tell a story about the aim why we dance," the composer says. "In the function of I was in clubs and I love clubs, but existing is so a lot despondency existing."
In the coating for "Impressive," a sarcastic breakup ballad and his second big hit, he emerges from a Brussels subway take in sunrise fee hour. He staggers fine hair the streets as if high. At all help, others relinquish him; he calls it a weight of "our true clemency." The song was motivated by a driven out man who in the same way as yelled at the composer and his girlfriend, "So you think you're beautiful!"
"I never forgot this detention, and I put it in my song, actually: Tu te crois beau," Stromae says. "He was so right, demolish if this guy was high or unimportant or fire-starting. He is just independently, and he needs hang loose to listen to him."
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