from
Nils Minkmar
With a studio interview on the main news program of the French broadcaster TF1, the Belgian singer Stromae wrote nothing less than cultural history last Saturday. It begins like a sequence that every adult TV viewer has seen countless times, a kind of question-and-answer ritual in the studio with an artist who has been away for a long time and now wants to present his new album. The presenter asks about the various world musical instruments that are used on the album called “Multitude” (including a Chinese violin), and Stromae – his stage name results from the inversion of the title Maestro – lists his various influences: Brazil , Rwanda, the music of the whole world flows into one another in the work of the young Belgian. He then nicely praises diversity, the diversity that gave his album its title.