Stromae’s Relational Aesthetic: An Excerpt From “Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects”

The following is an excerpt from Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects by Daphne Lamothe, which is available wherever books are sold.

In May 2013, someone anonymously uploaded a sixty-second video titled “Stromae Bourré à Bruxelles!” (Stromae Drunk in Brussels!) to YouTube. The images, seemingly captured by a cellphone, show the musician Paul Van Haver in a state of apparent emotional distress. In the video, Van Haver, who goes by the stage name Stromae, has abandoned his carefully curated persona: known to his fans as a fastidious and elegant dresser, his dishevelment startles. His melancholy matches the mood of the day, which is overcast and dark. Stromae loiters aimlessly in the middle of a major transportation hub called Port Louise. He squints and pinches the bridge of his nose. His posture, usually lithe and lean, curves like a comma as he crumples wearily onto the curb. He barely notices when two young women approach him. We cannot hear their words, but they seem to be warning him of the hazards of sitting so close to oncoming traffic.

Days later, fans of the musician learned they had been watching raw footage for a music video, directed by Jérôme Guiot. In actuality, “Stromae Drunk in Brussels” was meant to be raw material for “Formidable,” the video accompanying the second release from the studio album Racine Carrée. The director and performer amplified and reassembled elements of the original footage so that its fragments could cohere into a kind of plotless narrative. In the finished product, the camerawork grows more sophisticated and expressive as it moves freely—close to the ground, overhead, long shots, and close-ups—in order to include a broader range of perspectives. The sonic landscape expands too: music and melody now layered over the sounds of ringing streetcar bells, footfall, and rain hitting pavement. What we initially perceived as typical city noise now resounds as a soundtrack to urban life. With this reframing, onlookers and viewers were transformed too: no longer mere witnesses to the spectacle of Stromae on a bender, we are all now the audience for the small yet remarkable dramas of everyday life in a major European city. The video’s documentary style transforms “Formidable” from a piece of pop ephemera into a singular work of art and notable example of the contemporary Black aesthetic at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Ironically, Stromae’s personal identity and music don’t fit neatly or clearly into strict or narrow definitions of Blackness. Moreover, his music, even as it regularly interpolates African American and West African rhythms and sounds, presses against the edges of genres typically labeled as Black (e.g., jazz or hip-hop, reggae or socca, and High Life or Afrobeats). In fact, from some vantage points, the eclecticism of Stromae’s influences might appear so global and cosmopolitan as to render his music culturally uprooted and unmoored, with a sound and style anchored primarily in the unique tastes of the performer himself.

Rather than viewing Stromae and his music as uncharacteristically Black, however, it is precisely the dislocation, hybridity, and fluidity that contribute to his sound that make his work representative of contemporary Blackness. The premise of Guiot and Stromae’s setup, that their cameras would offer an unmediated window into Brussels’ everyday life, lies in tension with the fact that their addition of sound and visual images essentially constructs a loose narrative and inspires the audience to create our own stories to help make sense of what we are seeing. In fact, “Formidable’s” association with cinema verité filmmaking, a genre associated with the unveiling of reality’s hidden truths and subjects, prompts consideration of the aesthetic, temporal, and philosophical moves made that widen the aperture onto Blackness. Viewed through this expanded field of vision, Stromae’s performance reveals itself to be less about the spectacle of public drunkenness and more about the unfolding series of encounters with others that spark considerations of the limits and possibilities of envisioning Blackness as a form of “being-in-the-world” (see figure 1.1).

Rather than viewing Stromae and his music as uncharacteristically Black, however, it is precisely the dislocation, hybridity, and fluidity that contribute to his sound that make his work representative of contemporary Blackness.

Stromae’s performance in the music video suggests that identity operates like time, in that both are changing and dynamic and exist in relation to an/other: we know the present to be distinct from past and future; we think of the “self” as an entity distinct from an Other. These ideas, which operate at the level of allusion in the video, resonate deeply with Martin Heidegger’s articulation of “being-in-the-world,” which similarly conceives of Being as inextricably informed by relationality and time. Heidegger underscores the idea that relation is constitutive of Being, or Dasein: “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being that Being is an issue for it.” He goes on to establish Time as the standpoint from which we develop our understanding of what it means to be a person who has been “thrown” into the world. Taylor Carman cogently summarizes Heidegger’s articulation of the relevance of time to ontology: “Time is what makes possible our asking of the question of the meaning of being, the question, What does it mean to be? What is it to be? We ask that question always only against the background (or “horizon”) of time, in particular the temporal structure of our own existence—our past history, our contemporary condition, our projects, our future—and we answer the question, whether tacitly in our behaviors and practices or explicitly in our thoughts and words, in irreducibly temporal terms.” Though Heidegger certainly never imagined that Black and African people could be subjects of his philosophical musings, his articulation of temporality runs through and resonates with popular and critical discourses on Black existence that focus on historical phenomena, like the Middle Passage and Black Atlantic enslavement, that have led to modern formations of “Blackness” as a signifier of nonbeing-in-the-world. Accordingly, Heidegger’s articulation of the interconnected and interdependent nature of time and being makes clear the ontological resonances within Black Studies’ “commitment to the idea that the slave past provides a ready prism for understanding and apprending the black political present.”

Stromae’s performance in the music video suggests that identity operates like time, in that both are changing and dynamic and exist in relation to an/other: we know the present to be distinct from past and future; we think of the ‘self’ as an entity distinct from an Other.

As a meditation on social/aesthetic encounter, however, “Formidable” aims for something different in that Stromae’s performance of Black-European presence and present-ness focuses instead on Blackness as a form of being produced through aesthetic engagement. In other words, it offers the unpredictable and unscripted nature of mundane and quotidian interactions in order to re-member Black subjective experiences of being-in-the-world.

This reading resonates with the thinking of critic Tavia Nyong’o, who also employs a temporal framework in his exploration of racial representation. Nyong’o argues that the storytelling function of creative Black texts is to “disrupt the hostile and constraining conditions of [the Black subject’s] emergence into representation” through works of “Afro-fabulation.” The “fabulist” traverses timelines in that “he carries over concepts, percepts, and affects from one regime of representation into another in a manner that is neither up-to-date nor out-of-date but truly untimely.” I take Nyong’o’s trenchant articulation of the untimeliness of Black art as a reminder not to conflate or flatten the various dimensions of Black time, which can be historical, political, spiritual, and aesthetic, if not more. As such, we should regard Black forms of being as similarly multitudinous.

Daphne Lamothe is professor of Africana studies at Smith College.