The singer confided in BFMTV on her success and her music, on the occasion of this new release.
This is without doubt one of the most awaited records of this beginning of the year. Aya Nakamura reinvests this Friday the shelves of record stores with DNK, his fourth album. Fifteen new songs that have every chance of confirming the phenomenal success of the 27-year-old singer.
“I do not realize all this exposure and this notoriety”, she assures however at the microphone of BFMTV. “I’m trying to live my life and enjoy this fame any way I can.”
“I think I have the same habits as all women, it’s just that I’m known”, summarizes the interpreter of Djadjathe tube that made her a star in 2018. A status with which she is, perhaps, not always comfortable: “To be put on a pedestal, it puts a lot of distance and it dehumanizes.”
It is with the same tweezers that she welcomes the nickname “Queen” (queen, in English), which her fans regularly attribute to her: “I see it as a synonym of leader. I’m seen more as a leader than a follower, a girl who has her head on her shoulders and who knows what she wants. There is also the side that is a little sure of me. A little too sure, I think. I’ve been blamed for that before.”
Unprecedented success
Aya Nakamura however did not steal her place on the podium. After Djadjaincluded in Instagram stories of Madonna, Rihanna or Sam Smith, her second album Nakamura is also paved with tubes, girlfriends at pookie Passing by Dowry. The success took on a new dimension in the summer of 2020, when his third album aya earned him to become the most listened to French-speaking artist worldwide on Spotify. Unheard of in the French landscape for an artist mixing pop, hip-hop, Afro and Caribbean sounds.
It is an understatement to say that with DNK – the consonants of Dianoko, her real last name – the stakes are high. Especially since the secret will have been kept until the end: apart from the single Baby, no excerpt from the disc was revealed before its release. How do you start making new songs, after having already had such success?
“(For ‘DNK’), I was waiting for the moment when I was going to do things without thinking. (The) moment when you walk into the studio and you don’t ask yourself any more questions, you just love it.”
“In work, I find positive in naivety,” she continues. “I think that’s the most important thing. When you don’t have it, it’s not good. That’s what allows you to do things without calculating.”
“People feel it, when it’s real”
It is perhaps this spontaneity that has earned Aya Nakamura to unite an audience as large as it is loyal: “If there is no naivety, there is no real feeling. And I think the people feel it, when it’s fake (false, editor’s note) and when it’s true. Those who listen to me feel it.”
If that is the case, DNK will not disappoint them. Aya Nakamura’s fourth album is a “sensitive, 360 version” record, in her words: “In all the emotions that I reveal, it’s a sensitivity, one way or another. Whether it’s the sex appeal, sadness, melancholy, joy, rupture, love, these are just sensitive sides of my personality.”
If she allows herself this introspection, she does not deny her assumed sexy imprint, already explored in titles like Wine Up Where Prefer. “I see myself as a woman who knows her strengths. Not at all as an object woman, but as a woman who loves herself and who sometimes plays with the male sex.”
Are men so easily manipulated? “I didn’t say that,” she laughs. “Women are the same. We are naive, manipulable, but men are also very weak in the face of the flesh.”
This new album, she will defend it in May with three consecutive dates at the Accor Arena, the places of which were sold in the space of a few days. It is rumored that at the same time, Beyoncé will perform at the Stade de France. If confirmed, Aya Nakamura will rush to listen to the American diva as soon as her own concert is over: “I won’t be able to enjoy the concert as much as the others. It doesn’t matter!”.
