Aminé (born Adam Aminé Daniel)
Ethiopian-American
Hip-hop Artist
SoundCloud: heyamine
YouTube: Amine
Instagram: @heyamine
Going by his stage name, Aminé is a hip-hop artist from Portland, Oregon, and the son of Ethiopian immigrants. He is well known for his debut single, Caroline, which peaked at #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and currently has over 136 million views on YouTube. The song was originally posted to SoundCloud in March 2016, and instantly started a bidding war between record labels – Republic Records won. And by June 2016, Aminé directed and released the Caroline music video on his Vevo account.
But music was not always Aminé’s first love. He grew up wanting to be like Kobe Bryant, but his dreams were crushed when he was cut from his high school basketball team 2 years in a row. Aminé then settled for track and field.
In regards to music, Aminé remembers his parents “..listened to everything from reggae to indigenous African music to John Mayer. His older cousin introduced him to R&B, while he discovered hip-hop on his own: The first CD he ever bought was Kanye West's The College Dropout…”
In 2014 he dropped his first mixtape, Odyseey to Me, but later pulled the album offline. Aminé knew he had to search within to figure out what he wanted his sound to be. During this time, he also solicited constructive feedback from his friends. The end result? A sound that consisted of his Ethiopian roots mixed with hip-hop and R&B. From this place of discovery, Aminé released his sophomore mixtape, Calling Brio.
As of April 7th, he released the official music video for his latest single, Redmercedes, on YouTube. The video already has garnered over 1.7 million views.
Interesting fact: Amine’s rap career started in high school (Benson Polytechnic), when he made diss tracks about rival high schools.
Sources: Willamette Week and Tadias