It was January 9, 2022 at the end of the sacrosanct 8 p.m. Journal on TF1. The guest was a ghost. The one whose media had been wondering for seven years already when he would finally be back on the front of the music scene. Stromae was there, tight bun on his head, tie and navy blue suit over a white shirt, and he answered wisely, almost timidly to Anne-Claire Coudray’s questions. Until then, the classic prime-time artist interview. And then, after discussing the musical influences of the Belgian maestro, the journalist evoked the malaise experienced by the artist during his absence and asked a seemingly innocuous question about the singer’s loneliness. “Did music help you free yourself from it?” Stromae then interpreted facing the camera in a long sequence shot an unreleased piece, L’Enfer. The scene had been recorded the day before, but on the screen we only saw fire. Not only did Stromae thus break the usual television codes, but it also upset traditional journalistic codes and some saw in it the crossing of a red line between information and promotion. A lot of ink has flowed. The performance remained and was viewed by more than seven million people. A winning return, a real one. It was not the first time that the musician had shaken up the TV (see box), even if until then, the performances of the musical king of the Belgians had been unanimously hailed. It must be said that in terms of communication operations, Paul Van Haver, his real name, has nothing to envy to Kanye West and other Beyoncé. The first is also a fan and he did not hesitate to show it by joining him on the stage of the Coachella music festival in 2015 when he performed his first hit, So we dance. Paulo, as his friends call him, has no marketing training. And his stunts are not the work of an armada of communicators from a major either. He created his own label Mosaert, which encompasses his clothing brand, a design, music and video studio. His career is managed by him, only surrounded by his close guard made up of a historic hard core of relatives, including his manager and childhood friend Dimitri Borrey, his two brothers, Luc Junior Tam, the youngest, artistic director and of course, his wife and stylist Coralie Barbier. “I’m not ashamed to say that I do marketing, he confided to Challenges in 2014. It’s part of my job. I even regularly look at the advertisements circulating on the Net, and do not hesitate to inspire me.” Control freak Stromae? Without a doubt, and ambitious too. “From Racine Carrée, I took the step of being heard everywhere, and it worked,” he explained in Télérama last month. Proud, yes, but never pretentious or pedantic. Stylish, yes, but not bling-bling. Smart, creative and always well behaved in short. Paul can thank his mother Miranda for that. It was with her that the kid born on March 12, 1985 in Etterbeek, in the suburbs of Brussels, grew up.
THE ARTIST OF ALL RECORDS
• Over 5 million albums sold worldwide. • 209 concert dates and 1.6 million spectators for the Racine Carrée album tour. • 500,000 euros: the price of his new show inaugurated in preview in Brussels, Paris and Amsterdam last February.
• 10 million euros in revenue received before tax, in 2014 thanks in particular to Racine Carrée, the tour and derivative products. • 5 Victoires de la musique won, one in 2011, three in 2014 and one in 2015. • 883 million views for the Papaoutai clip on YouTube.
His career
2010
CHEESEAAfter the madness of the song So we dance, Stromae releases his first album with addictive sounds mixed with texts with a depressive tendency.
2013
RACINE CARREE This second album full of hits (Papaoutai, Formidable, Tous lesêmes) manages the feat of convincing both critics and the general public. Quadruple Diamond Disc!
2014
MOSAERT Stromae and his wife launch the Mosaert clothing brand, a colorful unisex inspired by Art Deco and wax, the African fabric with colorful patterns.
2017
THE RAINDuring his very long break, Stromae still sings this title with Orelsan on the album La fête est finie, in which he also produced the song Tout va bien.
2022
MULTITUDE
On this long-awaited new opus, Stromae multiplies musical influences and uses Asian instruments for the first time. We find there its so characteristic mixture of spleen and dancing rhythms.
A great family
Stromae, or rather Paul, has never been very forthcoming about his love life. We just know that from 2011 to 2012 he lived a love story with Tatiana Silva, a Belgian of Cape Verdean origin, who was Miss Belgium in 2005 and today presents the weather forecast on TF1 and LCI. In 2012, through mutual friends, he met Coralie Barbier, a young and pretty Belgian designer. He is crazy about fashion, she offers him to create clothes that correspond to her songs. The second-hand clothes story turns into a love story. They have discretion in common and are both fatherless. Coralie lost hers in a diving accident when she was little. They married on December 12, 2015 in Mechelen, Belgium in front of the hoodlum priest, Guy Gilbert. To guarantee the secrecy of this union, the one hundred and eighty guests do not know the reason for the invitation and discover it once there. In September 2018, the lovers become the happy parents of a little boy.
Her looks
From its beginnings on the front of the stage, Stromae has its own style. A mix of preppy and colorful fabrics often derived from wax, its look intrigues with its uniqueness and ultra-well cut style. In 2014, with Coralie, his darling, who will soon be his wife, he launched Mosaert. They held their first fashion show at Le Bon Marché store in Paris.
At home, Paul leads the life of Mr. Everyman
She is Flemish, insurance agent, then civil servant in the administration and likes to travel the world with her five children, Paul therefore, her three brothers and her sister. Their father, Pierre Rutare, is absent. This Rwandan architect who met Stromae’s mother during his studies returned to Kigali without having recognized his children. The musician has only seen him about twenty times in all and for all, and he won’t hesitate to describe him as a “runner” and a “flirter”. He is, however, the spitting image of this great absentee and inherited his hardworking character from him. It is only at the age of 12 that he will learn that he was killed like the rest of his Rwandan family in 1994 in the genocide of the Tutsis. Since then, Paul has forgiven the absence. At school, the young boy is rather dissipated. When he almost gets fired, his mother sends him off to boarding school in a Jesuit establishment. Total change of universe. “I was leaving a hypermixed neighborhood for an environment where there were only bourgeois sons, with well-groomed locks, like the Beatles. Instinctively, I hated all these guys”, he confided in Télérama in 2013. He started rapping and after boarding school, he returned to his mother. He will stay there until he is 27 years old. In 2003, he recorded his first music video, Faut qu’t’Arretes le Rap, where we see him, his head shaved, floating in a tracksuit three times too big for him. At the same time, he began studying sound engineering and worked in a fast food restaurant to pay for his first four titles. He also begins to publish on YouTube his Lessons, where he humorously explains his computer compositions. Interning with NRJ Belgium, the already clever musician manages to broadcast his new title, So we dance, on the air. The tube machine is launched. The song will end up at the top of the charts in fifty countries. We know the rest. A first album, Cheese, which is a hit, a second, Racine Carrée, which will conquer the world. A huge tour and then the blackout, the depression (see box). Stromae then becomes Paul again. He continues to write and compose, but for others. Vitaa, Bigflo and Oli, Orelsan and then clips for Billie Eilish and Yaël Naim. Paul himself has a tidy family life. He became a dad and says that since the birth of his little boy, in 2018, his days resemble those of Mr. Everyman: work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., then return home. Coralie, his wife, keeps watch. From now on, after having lived through Hell, he swears, he thinks about his health and gives up a little on the requirement to make room for pleasure. To his fans too, he promises again. A Multitude of course, but this time without forgetting each other.
His descent into hell
In June 2015, Stromae is an international star. He has sold millions of copies of Racine Carrée, filled Madison Square Garden in New York and performed over 200 concerts around the world. After Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, he must perform in Kigali, that of Rwanda, the country of his father, killed in 1994 in the genocide of Tutsis as part of his family. A symbolic date that he will have to cancel. “I was stressed, exhausted. Everything predisposed me to freak out. During the concert, I didn’t realize it. My brother, he had the click, he understood that there was something wrong, he will tell later on France Ô. If he hadn’t been there, I probably would have committed suicide that night. I am weighing my words: if he hadn’t been there, I don’t think I could talk to you. Urgently repatriated to Belgium, Stromae suffers from serious psychological problems. He will be hospitalized for a time, then in forced rest for two years.
The king of promo shots
Stromae is not only an excellent musician, he is also a communication genius who does nothing like the others. And he did not wait for the now famous interview at 8 p.m. on TF1 to prove it. On May 24, 2013, he unveiled a new title, Formidable, in the show Tonight (or never!) live on France 2, pretending to have abused alcohol or other substances in front of the dumbfounded guests. A few days before, for the filming of the clip, the singer had been filmed with a hidden camera in the street in Brussels falsely drunk in front of embarrassed passers-by. Amateur videos of these same passers-by had already leaked on social networks, maintaining the mystery. In four days, the clip will be viewed 4 million times. A few months later, Stromae doubles up, half-man half-woman, on the set of the Grand Journal de Canal + to interpret All the same. Bluffing. For his first television in the United States, on June 17, 2014, he was carried like an unarticulated puppet on the set of Late Night with Seth Meyers to sing Papaoutai. He also reserves his very first live Health title on December 10, 2021 for the famous American show The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and delivers a performance as intriguing as it is impeccable. Simply wonderful.
See also:
Louise Monteil