"The Queen" brought home three crowns. Following her consecration at the Victoires de la Musique award ceremony in February, Aya Nakamura received three awards on April 25 at the Flammes alternative music awards which honors popular music, i.e. rap, R'n'B, afrobeat and dancehall: the Flame for Female Artist of the Year, New Pop Album and International Outreach. "Thank you to all of you, I receive all the love, the messages, despite the controversies, the criticism," said the singer, who has been the target of violent attacks since she was tipped to perform during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. She then dedicated her trophies to "all Black people, the little girls who watch me. Of course, we come from far away." And, more broadly, she dedicated her trophies to her "fanbase," which has earned her hundreds of millions of listens on platforms.
The artist's name first appeared, on Le Monde's website in the Le Monde Africa section, on August 25, 2017, the day of the release of her debut album, Journal Intime. Marie Zinck was the journalist who first introduced her: "She may not yet be as well known as the Japanese character Hiro Nakamura from the Heroes series, from which she drew her stage name. But Aya Nakamura is one of the up-and-coming singers of African origin. She is very much in the playlists of teenage girls who are sensitive to R'n'B and Afro-trap influences." The journalist described a young woman, 22 at the time, the eldest of five siblings, born in Mali "into a family of griots [storytellers]" and "lulled by her mother's traditional songs." Nakamura, whose real name is Aya Danioko, came to France "as a child" and grew up in the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois.
After dropping out of fashion studies, she released her first track, "Karma," on Facebook in 2014. She claimed to be a fan of Malian diva Oumou Sangaré. The track "Brisé," in 2015, racked up "13 million views on YouTube" in two years. And the hits just kept on coming. "'Comportement,' 'Bad Boy,' 'Oublier': In just a few years, Aya has managed to reach a varied and above all African audience," said Zinck. She did this via collaborations with renowned artists such as Congolese Fally Ipupa and Senegalese-Guinean rapper MHD. "But it was her 2015 duet with rapper Fababy that really propelled her into the industry. 'Love d'un Voyou' now boasts over 42 million views on YouTube."
Nakamura's career is interwoven with the internet. Hardly an article goes by without mentioning her digital audience. Her talent seems in part indexed to the number of clicks. In a February 2019 article, Stéphanie Binet recalled the figures for her second album, Nakamura, released in 2018: "Half of the 300 million YouTube views and 150 million online listens come from non-French-speaking countries." "Djadja" and "Copines" had already become summer hits.
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