Angèle – Bruxelles je t'aime
2021 · Directed by Dissidence
275K Likes
Best comments
1.“She explains Belgium so well in this song. We're never number one, and for a fact we don't care at all... we're used to getting second place, and that's more than good enough.”
More comments
- 2.“People talking about their hometown is one of the most beautiful things.”
- 3.“I was packing for my trip to Brussels when I suddenly heard this song... and I really cried a little. When I read the English translation of the lyrics, I cried more.”
The story
Angèle is Belgium's biggest pop export, and this is her love letter to home. She started writing Bruxelles je t'aime during the first COVID lockdown in 2020, when getting from Paris back to Brussels suddenly got hard and she realized how much she missed the place. She has said the idea was to talk to a city the way you'd talk to a lover – and the song plays it exactly that way, holding scrappy, rainy Brussels up against the glamour of Paris and New York and choosing Brussels anyway.
It's also a small act of peacemaking. Belgium has spent generations bickering over French versus Dutch, and Angèle sings part of this one in Dutch – her first song ever to do that. A French-speaking pop star reaching across the language fence in a party song. Diplomats, take notes.
The video, directed by Dissidence, puts her on a Paris-to-Brussels train styled after the Orient Express and slowly swallowed by plants, turning the trip home into a rolling party. The song went to number one in Wallonia, number three in Flanders and top ten in France, led off her album Nonante-Cinq (Belgian French for ninety-five, the year she was born), and the video picked up a UK Music Video Awards nomination for production design.
