Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul – Googoo Gaga
Today, acclaimed Belgian artists Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul share “GOOGOO GAGA” – a restless, playful meditation on motherhood, out now via Because Music.
The pair return after four years with the first release since their debut album, Topical Dancer.
Accompanied by a cinematic and artistic visual utilising a tableau vivant, “GOOGOO GAGA” finds Adigéry giving voice to the relentless rhythms of caring for a young child: feeding and carrying, crying and sleeping, mess and repetition, guilt and uncertainty. Against Pupul’s simmering electronic production (co-produced by the legendary Soulwax, David & Stephen Dewaele), the minutiae of early parenthood accumulate into something funny, fraught and deeply human.
At its heart, the song explores the largely invisible work of parenthood and motherhood, the endless small acts of care alongside the much larger questions that accompany them. How do you protect a child without allowing fear to dictate their life? How do you learn to be a parent while you are already parenting? And what happens to the idea that raising a child “takes a village” when so much of that responsibility is still experienced alone?
Adigéry & Pupul elaborate on the new single: ”It takes a village, and yet you’re doing it alone. This record was made as we both became parents: ‘Googoo Gaga’ is about feeling drained, the self-sacrifice, the overwhelm, yet embracing all of it.”
The single arrives with imagery that extends these questions of motherhood and care into a wider meditation on race, gender and their relationship to power. Directed by Lennert Madou, the visual reference at the centre of “GOOGOO GAGA” is the Flemish folklore figure De Mammelokker, a legend embedded in the folklore of the duo’s home city of Ghent and itself derived from the ancient Roman story of Roman Charity. In the tale, a prisoner condemned to starvation is kept alive when his daughter secretly breastfeeds him during her visits.
In the arresting visual, Adigéry and Pupul reimagine this tableau with a Black woman feeding an elderly white man, transforming an image of nurture into something more confrontational. In their interpretation, care is not synonymous with submission. The image instead asks who is expected to nourish whom, whose labour sustains existing structures of power and what happens when the person traditionally underestimated within that structure becomes the source of survival.
The image also speaks to the ways Black women’s experiences can be diminished or disbelieved, including within maternal healthcare, where disparities in treatment and outcomes remain stark. Here, the nurturing body is neither passive nor peripheral. It occupies the centre of the frame, reclaiming care as an expression of agency and resilience.
On “GOOGOO GAGA,” those enormous shifts are distilled into the repetitive, sometimes absurd details of everyday life with a baby. Domestic sounds and actions become their own vocabulary; the overwhelming and the mundane coexist. Time seems simultaneously precious and interminable.
It is this contradiction that gives “GOOGOO GAGA” its charge: parenthood as joy without sentimentality, care without idealisation, and love existing alongside exhaustion, fear and doubt. In Adigéry & Pupul’s hands, the smallest gestures become a way of asking much bigger questions about who cares, who is cared for, and the histories we carry while attempting to raise the next generation.
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