Aya Nakamura tells her chaotic love stories to a zouk love tune

The most listened to French-speaking artist in the world, a young black woman at the forefront of French variety, a suburbanite with a language not always understood but often imitated, Aya Nakamura arouses as much fascination as mockery. His songs, Djadja, pookie, Behaviour, first became summer hits, then nightclub staples. His highly anticipated fourth album, DNK, published Friday, January 27, should delight its fans. And allow the artist, born in Mali and who grew up with her family in the city of 3,000 in Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis), to take a new step.

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Tickets to her two concerts on May 26 and 27 at the Accor Arena in Paris were certainly sold out in a few hours (a third date was added, May 28), but the now mother of two young children is obliged to reinvent to be able to stay in tune with his early fans, these very versatile “93” schoolboys, who quickly moved on to something else.

For this, she made an artistic choice. The vast majority of titles DNK have a zouk love color, this languorous zouk mixing American R’n’B with the swaying of West Indian music, created in the early 1990s by Guadeloupean Jean-Michel Rotin. Music acclaimed by the Afro-Caribbean community in nightclubs on the outskirts of major metropolitan cities but disdained by the major French media.

Slang reinvented

Aya Nakamura likes to rehabilitate the music of her adolescence. With pieces like To stick on, the couples will be able to embrace on the dance floors. Ingenious in reinventing her slang or bringing musical trends up to date, the singer does not rely on originality for the titles of her albums: Nakamura in 2018, aya in 2020 and today DNK, or the consonants of his surname, Danioko. It must be said that she puts a lot of herself into her records.

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For this rather well-made zouk love album, she reveals her chaotic love stories, where her “baby does not want to accept his wrongs” (SMS). On the title You are scared, she crossbred her zouk love of Latin chat with the Puerto Rican Myke Towers, clever to keep an audience in South America and hang up the wagons of reggaeton. For the French public, there is the now unmissable Tiakola on Gift or Booba’s new lieutenant, SDM, for one of the most successful tracks on the record, Daddy.

The singer deviates twice from zouk love with a very surprising Beleckproduced by Max and Seny, which we do not know if they are influenced by Jamaican dancehall or by new South African dance music. His pop ballads like corazon Where I am in pain are much less happy, written in a childish and scholarly way – “My heart is crying out for help”she says in I am in pain. Without her slang, Aya Nakamura falls into the banal.

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