"Paul Van Haver is a musician for his time, with the charts, headlines and YouTube clicks to prove it — a gravel-voiced, mixed-race performer whose melancholic French-language dance pop has channeled, to popular acclaim, the gray that currently hangs over Europe. Mr. Van Haver, 28, who is best known as his stage persona Stromae, rose to fame with a beat-heavy 2009 single called 'Alors On Danse' (So We Dance) that is still played at parties and clubs across the Continent. It is a mournful anthem that evokes unemployment, divorce, debt, the financial crisis and a sort of resigned hope 'to forget all our problems'; it reached No.1 on the charts in 19 countries. Still Mr. Van Haver has no desire to be a 'salesman of the crisis,' he said in an interview here, and his music is by no means intended to intensify European pessimism, although he has at least once called his genre 'suicide dance.'"
NY Times
Wikipedia
YouTube: Alors on danse, Formidable, Te Quiero, Papaoutai
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