Music Video: Marteria - Kids

There are a lot of artists out there who come out with a great first album, then kind of fade away as they run through their best material.  Other artists only seem to improve with every album that they put out.

Marteria is one of these artists.

I have always liked Marteria's German-language hip-hop sound.  Even in his alternate incarnation as Marsimoto, his beats and rhymes were pretty decent - even if the Marsimoto concept gets old very quickly.  But over the course of his three albums as Marteria, it has been exciting to watch him grow and improve.  His first album, Base Ventura, was decent enough.  His second, Zum Glück in die Zukunft, with its track Secundenschlaf, was really good.  His collaborative EP with Miss Platnum and Yasha, Lila Wolken, was freakin' awesome.

So, today I bring you Marteria's hit track Kids from his recently released album Zum Glück in die Zukunft II.  I don't know whether it's the chorus that burrows into my head, or just the visuals of attractive female German field hockey players busting through an office in the video that I find so appealing (the latter predilection dating from my years attending a private prep school in the United States), but a month or so after first hearing this track, I still find myself frequently humming it to myself.  Oh, and the rest of the album is equally good too.

Music Video: Stromae - Papaoutai

I absolutely adore the music coming out of Belgium these days.  I don't know what it is about that small country of just 11 million people, but they create some spectacular music out of all proportion to their size.  Unfortunately - at least from the standpoint of this blog - much of the awesome artists from Belgium perform in English.  Selah Sue, Customs, The Van Jets, Hooverphonic, and many others are artists who would pull in crowds anywhere.  But they all perform mostly or exclusively in English.  While that is fine from a marketing perspective, from my selfishly and jealously nativistic (in a nationally agnostic sort of way) perspective, this is too bad.  However, while I was perusing YouTube this afternoon, I was stunned to find a Belgian artist with hits in the tens of millions (and one with over 111 million hits!!!!!!!!), not just for one song - that could be considered a fluke - but for multiple songs.  How is an artist with this many hits not climbing to the top of the American charts and winning multiple Grammys?

Well, for one thing, Stromae only sings in French.

Born of a Belgian mother and a Rwandan father who was killed in the Rwandan genocide, Stromae produces an incredible blend of hip hop, electronica, dance, chanteur, and Caribbean.   His recent song Papaoutai perfectly encapsulates this uniquely infectious sound.   Stromae is everything I started this blog to find.  I hope you enjoy him too.

Music Video: Moop Mama - Liebe

I have always taken a certain perverse pleasure in music that defies rules and genres.  I enjoy the polka/punk stylings of Polkacide.  I groove on Deutsch/reggae rhythm of Seeed.  Even the lounge/new wave hybrid of Nouvelle Vague excites me, despite its almost hypnotic mellowness.  So, what happens when you combine hip-hop with jazz and marching band instrumentation (yes, even including a sousaphone!)?  You get Moop Mama from Munich, and in particular, you get their single from 2012, Liebe.

A year or so ago, I wrote about another band called LaBrassBanda that has become quite popular here in Germany that comes from rural Bavaria, and that also combines rap with brass.  But while LaBrassBanda brings in more classical instrumentation and influences combined with a more traditional rock and roll rhythm section, Moop Mama is essentially a marching band with vocals rapped at hyper speed.  Moop Mama describes their style as "urban brass".  I think of it more as a half-time-show with attitude.