Do we like them?

Do we like Stromae?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Clean on harm and decent on character, but the public record is thin on big causes, so it stops short of a 9.

Stromae is Paul Van Haver, born in Brussels to a Belgian mother and a Rwandan father. His father was killed in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and he grew up without him. That absence is the beating heart of “Papaoutai”, the song that made him a global name.

The name is a bit of wordplay: Stromae is “maestro” flipped in verlan, French slang. After starting out as Opmaestro in 2001, he got his break when a Brussels radio station played “Alors on danse”, which went to number one in about a dozen countries by 2010. He then spent years as one of the biggest French-language acts going.

On the harm test, there is honestly very little to chase. He sings “Tous les mêmes” from both a man's and a woman's side and performs it in half-drag, and he posed in character for a French magazine shoot marrying himself during the same-sex marriage debate. He told Out the speculation about him “didn't bother me”, which is a pretty relaxed take.

The one real stoush on record is not about anything he said. In October 2019 anti-PMA marchers in Paris, who opposed opening medically assisted reproduction to lesbian couples and single women, played “Papaoutai” at their rally. His press attaché said he was against the song and its message being twisted like that, and the report said he was weighing legal action. We found no sign a case was ever filed, so treat that as a threat, not a result.

As for the good-person test, the search turned up no court rulings, no allegations from established outlets and no tales of him treating crew or fans badly. In 2022 he said he didn't want to cash in on the post-MeToo mood with “Déclaration”, and that with “Fils de joie” he wanted to celebrate “Rosa and the others”. For the harm side, we also found no dodgy co-stars or studios in his recent work, which is mostly his own and a Tove Lo duet.