Does Aya Nakamura communicate French? | EUROtoday
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LE February 23, 2025, the clip of the track “Djadja” by Aya Nakamura reached the billion views on YouTube, the fourth French title to cross such a course, when the publication of his new album was introduced. And right here it’s even, underneath the pen of Ismaël Mereghetti, a “critical dictionary of Aya Nakamura”. It is just not but that of the French Academy, however the factor is uncommon for many who haven’t but reached the age of 30, which will likely be achieved subsequent May. Are we going to attend a lifting of colonial helmets, with a part of the opinion treating the Luronne once more as an antelope for hexagonal safari? This raises the query of a worldwide plebiscite round a rudely criticized singer in her personal nation, since this native of Mali has been French since 2021.
Are we a Bastille of Taste in a disoriented universe, or a deaf folks with globalized music? However, it isn’t as we speak that our compatriots have been hospitalized to sounds from Greater Africa the place we communicate French. The “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango that Michael Jackson Sample, the “Sunday in Bamako” by Amadou and Mariam, the repertoire of Angélique Kidjo are all examples of open music, a lot the Congolese rumba, zouk, jazz, gospel, calypso, rock, with vocals Alternate with Yoruba or Swahili. In our Americanized campaigns, we take dance nation With Stetson and Western boots, however with out closing the door to the undulations of the Caribbean melodies and the Bantu funk.
Leaving from Mali, Benin or Senegal, the sounds from the African Creuset, usually recorded in Parisian studios, met a global resonance of which it might not be illegitimate to rejoice, even by planting a cockade on a griot cap. Music is a determine of what’s referred to as in English the “soft power”, in different phrases the vector of an affect usually unrelated to the geopolitical weight of a nation: that is how little Jamaica triumphed over the planet with reggae. And we are sometimes charmed by language innovations from French -speaking Africa. Do you understand how we are saying “copy on your neighbor” within the faculties of Senegal? “Girafer”, in reference to the lengthy neck animal.
From “da dou ron ron” to “dja dja”
It is on this panorama that it might be essential to situate each the success and the controversies raised by Aya Nakamura, primarily for his efficiency in the course of the inaugural ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games final July. And but: may we not refine the studying of this occasion, wealthy in subliminal evocations? In the Pot-Pourri that she interpreted was, in fact, ones onomatopoeia, however it’s hardly new within the French repertoire, of the “Da Dou Ron Ron” by Johnny Hallyday to the “Chabadabada” by Francis Lai, from the “Oh he eh hein good” from Nino Ferrer to the “For Me For Me, for me” by Charles Aznavour, additionally included with “Djadja”.
To uncover
The kangaroo of the day
Answer
Few spectators may have famous the Napoleonic substrate of the second: leaving the institute’s palace, assigned to Immortals by the emperor in 1805, Aya Nakamura was accompanied by the music of the Republican Guard, created by the primary consul in 1802. Wussing across the singer, the brass was discovered the way in which of the strolling brass bands of New Orleans Louisiana ceded by Bonaparte in 1803 within the United States.
If Roland Barthes had devoted considered one of his “mythologies” to this efficiency, he wouldn’t have didn’t detect all these markers of imperial Francité. Brandating the historical past of France as a defend mustn’t prohibit us from detecting its outcrops, the individuals, the acutely aware or unconscious collisions, if incongruous they seem. It was due to this fact carrying an invisible Napoleonic bicorn that Aya Nakamura crossed the Pont des Arts that day.
https://www.lepoint.fr/debats/aya-nakamura-parle-t-elle-francais-11-03-2025-2584492_2.php