Music: Can Belgium’s pop superstar Stromae find stardom in North America?

Originally published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here.

Can Belgium’s pop superstar Stromae find stardom in North America?

A recent promotional video for Stromae – a.k.a. Paul Van Haver, the 30-year-old Belgian pop sensation – has him standing outside Madison Square Garden wearing a turquoise polo, a bow tie and a sandwich board. "October 1, I'm performing here," he explains to indifferent passersby. "I'm the guy on the poster."

The stunt recalls a video from three years earlier, in which a 67-year-old New York subway rider notices that the middle-aged man beside her is whipping up attention like a cyclone. "Are you famous?" she asks. "Not very famous," Jay Z responds. "You don't know me."

I remember watching the clip and thinking, 'Is it possible that a breathing New Yorker doesn't recognize Jay Z?' I can only imagine how European viewers might respond to the Stromae video? In Manhattan, Van Haver may be just another schmuck, but in his native Belgium he's the biggest thing since Magritte, Eddy Merckx and freedom fries.

It's possible to imagine him as a star in North America too – the first French-language performer since Édith Piaf to make it huge west of the Atlantic. (In the anglophone world, Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Brel were more cult figures than superstars. Céline Dion went platinum only when she crossed over to English, and Daft Punk may be nominally French, but I'm pretty sure they were born in a secret laboratory underneath the Alps.)

Stromae, though, is the real deal: a European celebrity who refuses to release an English-language record. That's a problem in North America, where we pride ourselves on our fluency with pop culture but tune out the majority of foreign-language artists. (Want proof? If you ever find yourself in a record store again, visit the paltry "world" or "international" section, where Syrian dabke awkwardly shares space with Nigerian Afrobeat and the French chanson.)

On his current fall tour, Stromae will play Toronto's Echo Beach and what his promoters hope will be a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. Earlier this week, he played to 2,000 fans in Chicago and 2,500 in Boston. Next week, he'll play two shows at the Bell Centre in bilingual Montreal, the one North American city where he reliably packs arenas. He's hardly doing badly in North America, although it's absurd to imagine Jay Z working quite so hard to sell tickets in Europe.

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