Blog 3 My favorite artist

Perfection  

Paul Van Haven (1985) is a Belgian musician, performer, director and the creator of the fashion brand called Mosaert. He is most knowing like Stromae (maestro turned around).

He is the son of a Belgian mother and a rwandan father, his father died in the genocide of Rwanda in 1994.

He studied sound engineering and after he finished he began to compose music and try luck in Youtube with the series of videos called Leçons where he explained step by step all his creative process. This videos were successful very quick and he began to make very elaborated performances.

At the moment he has 2 albums: Cheese and Racine Carrée.

   

Like I told before he created the unisex fashion brand called Mosaert, the company works like a producer too. He works with his wife called Coralie Barbier (designer) and they collaborated with a lot of musicians. This year Mosaert participated in the Paris Fashion Week too. In his videoclips he use only Mosaert's clothes.

 

Honestly

What I like about him is that he is a complete artist because he worries about everything: the composition, the lyrics, the idea, the performance the visuality and the indumentary. His thematics are deep and from the cotidian life what makes it moving.
He only collaborates with alternative musicians. Madonna offered him to collaborate with her but he rejected her (that's why I love him so much).

The only way than I can show you how cool is him is by showing you his videoclips.

Hist first hit (knowing worldwide) is called Alors on danse (then we dance). It is about the monotony of life:  studies, work, debts, love, childs, and divorce. It's a critic about the sticky music that only makes you dance and with wich people try to forget their problems.

My favorite video is Papaoutai (Where are you dad) it talks about an absent father that's always working and it's represented by Stromae being in a static position (like a manikin) symbolizing the idea that he exist but he is not there. In the end of the video the son became a manikin too and it means that everyone end up becoming their parents.

I like when in the lyrics says "all the world know how to make babies but the people don't know how to be parents".

In the NRJ Music Awards in 2014 (awards in France to francophone and international musicians) he performed this song and the arrived the red carpet in character (like a manikin) and he was carried by 2 bodyguards along the red carpet, stopping to the paparazzis spot, and then leaving him in the stage.

 

A video that I always show to people to make them fall for Stromae is Carmen. The music and the lyrics are based in the opera with the same name of Bizet. The video is about the adiction to the phones and social media, it's represented by the Twitter bird and it grows with the adiction of the people.
Before Stromae released this video he made a social media performance, he created a Instagram account with the same aesthetic of the video publishing selfies and after a few pictures he died.

 

https://www.instagram.com/stromae/

The second most knowing song is Tous les memês (all the same) where Stromae is half men and half woman and talks about all the clichés that men and women say to each others like "all men are infidels" and the typical insensible sentence "it's because you're on your period".

In 2015 he went on tour to U.S.A and he made a serie of performances called Stromae takes America and with this song he married himself.

And the last video is Formidable, is one of my favorites performance and his character is a drunk man in the centre of a rainy Brussels with earphones and screaming the song. The song tell the monologue of this man that is divorced and he tells each person that all marriages end in divorces.

The funny thing is that he's disrupted by the police.

Nostalgic and aesthetic pleasure

In 2016 he said that he was going to take a breack of the music and focus in other jobs, like producer and director. He still doesn't come back but he participated with Orelsan in La pluie (the rain) this year.

He was the artistic director of the Billie Eilish's new videoclip Hostage.

And if one day you have time you need to see the Stromae's concert because is pure aesthetic pleasure.