Aminé

Aminé happens to be a major fan of Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino and states that he wishes to get into film direction and fashion someday.

Aminé is a very harsh critic of US President Donald Trump, primarily because of Trump’s highly controversial and conservative views on migrants and colored people.

Aminé was born Adam Aminé Daniel, on April 18, 1994, in Portland, Oregon, to Ethiopian immigrant parents. His father was a teacher, and his mother worked at a post office. His father also worked as a part-time translator. His parents moved from Ethiopia to the US in the early 1990s and settled in Portland, an all-white neighborhood.

As a black kid, who was also an immigrant, life was not easy for Aminé at first, but his charm and quirk helped him make some friends quickly. However, he still felt like an outsider. His family loved music, but they mostly listened to Ethiopian native music. They spoke Amharic at home. His mother listened to Tupac Shakur at times, which got Aminé extremely interested in the rapper’s works.

Other musicians that Aminé grew up listening to were Kanye West and Michael Jackson. He credits Kanye’s ‘The College Dropout’ as one of his biggest inspirations to get into rap music. When he reached high school, his love for rapping had him making beats of his own and writing raps.

He attended the ‘Benson Polytechnic High School,’ where he also found a few friends who were as musically inclined as him. What made him famous as a teenager were the diss tracks that he recorded as part of the playful rivalry between his and other high schools in the region. In 2012, he was awarded with the ‘Kevin Reilly Award’ in high school for his leadership abilities.

After graduating from high school, Aminé attended the ‘Portland State University’ to study marketing. However, his love for music took him to New York during every summer break. Thus, in the summers, he stayed with his aunt in New York and did internships. He also spent a few months interning with ‘Complex,’ a hip-hop music publication.

Aminé started working on his debut mixtape in 2013. Titled ‘Odyssey to Me,’ its production was handled by multi-instrumentalist Irvin Mejia. Most of the album was recorded in Portland. Aminé later dismissed it as an “amateur attempt with mismatch sounds.”

The album’s tracks were mostly emotional and sexually explicit, and although the album remained obscure due to lack of marketing and promotions, it earned Aminé a number of local admirers. One such admirer was Mac Smiff, who worked as a blogger for ‘We Out Here.’ He was a respected writer, and when he heard Aminé’s music, he fell in love with it. He started promoting Aminé through his blogs. Gradually, people began recognizing Aminé.

Inspired by the solid reception, Aminé spent his student-loan money to make sure that his album got highlighted on the popular music website ‘Datpiff.com.’ By mid-2014, ‘Odyssey to Me’ registered 20 thousand downloads, which was a great deal for a beginner such as Aminé.

Aminé then met a top manager from New York named Justin Lehmann, who tried to get significant song-writing jobs for Aminé and his friend and cohort Josh Hickman. Aminé and Hickman then released an EP titled ‘En Vogue.’ However, when Hickman observed Aminé getting closer to the mainstream music scene, he got insecure and pulled out the EP from the internet. He then began running a campaign to urge bloggers and fans to do the same.

After parting ways with Hickman, Aminé produced and released his second mixtape, ‘Calling Brío.’ Aminé delved into his Ethiopian routes to draw inspiration for the album. He used R&B, electronic, and hip-hop music and combined it with Afrofuturist sounds. He further used native African chants and other signature African sounds, which appealed to fans in a major way, making Aminé more famous.