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. "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. "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. 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. And that's the way I work in my music also."
What kind of music is it actually? We don't know, but we dance to it.
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. "The fact that I'm coming from Belgium helps me to be like that. And that's human and that's life," he says in a melodious tumble of accented English. That's international, and I like this word because it's not only about sadness or happiness – it's both at the same time. "Hip-hop, pop, dance – the common point is melancholy. 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. Reading on mobile? Click here to view Papaoutai video
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