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: Miraculous - ยังเสียใจ (Still Sad)

There's something that I always enjoy about really hip-hoppy/poppy reggae.  If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you'd know that I love artists that combine upbeat melodies and hip-hop influenced vocals with syncopated Caribbean and African rhythms.  So, artists like Seeed, Afroreggae, Irie Révoltés, and Culcha Candela get a lot of play here.

Well, just because I am going all the way to Thailand today does not mean that I will break with this tradition.  In fact, if you replace the German and English of Seeed, or the French and German of Irie Révoltés, or the Spanish and German of Culcha Candela with the Thai and English of Miraculous - as you do on their song ยังเสียใจ (Still Sad) - you will not feel overwhelming culture shock.

Unfortunately, like much of the music that I find from Asia, I am having a difficult time finding information about Miraculous that I can actually translate.  Bing Translator does yeoman's work of attempting to translate the band's bio on Last.fm from Thai to English, but the result is largely an unreadable garble. This is made even more difficult because, like a frustrating number of bands from around the world, their name is neither terribly unique or easily searchable.  That having been said, if you know anything about Miraculous, please post to the comments.  I'd love to know more.