aminé
Words: Tom Faber
Photos: Erik Carter
Styling: Tinbete Daniel
Aminé quit college to step into the spotlight with his “Vitamin D” genre of rap. Three studio albums, four mixtapes and five billion streams later, he’s still shining.
- Words Tom Faber
- Photos Erik Carter
- Styling Tinbete Daniel
- Hair Aliky Williams
- Makeup Alexa Hernandez
- Styling Assistant Thoreau Pedersen
Aminé wears a hat by ABELA023, a jacket, shirt and trousers by BLUEMARBLE and shoes by OUR LEGACY.
( 1 ) Aminé is the stage name of Adam Aminé Daniel.
( 2 ) The newspaper Aminé is reading on the cover is The Good For You Post—a real publication he produced and distributed to fans at pop-ups in LA and New York City. It addresses topics as diverse as gentrification, supernovas and skating, includes recipes and a word search, and features an article written by his mother.
Aminé is a certified Good Time.1 Despite being in danger of missing a flight to Japan, he’s all smiles, his eyes sparkling over our video call. He makes it into a cab and settles into the back seat. The sunroof bathes him in the warm California morning sun. Beneath his mint green headphones and oversized navy hoodie, he looks like he’s rolled straight out of bed: black beard wispy and untamed, a couple of stray dreadlocks hanging down beside his face.
“I don’t know many people in Tokyo,” he says in a gentle West Coast accent. “I like to be somewhere I can just hone in, be alone and focus on writing.” His new album is almost done and he needs to push it over the line, so he’s traveling to Tokyo to put his head down and focus. Fans have been waiting for five years and no one knows what to expect—his previous three albums have all had a different sound, each a unique fusion of hip-hop with pop, R&B and dance.
Aminé first gained acclaim not just for his technical proficiency as a rapper, but for the infectious sense of fun he brings to his music and videos. He has been classed alongside a new guard of musicians like Chance the Rapper, Lil Yachty and Tyler, the Creator, who are bringing color and goofiness to the sometimes serious world of rap. It’s a vibe he clearly telegraphed on the cover of his debut album, 2017’s sun-soaked Good for You, where he sits naked on a blue toilet set against a canary-yellow background.2
“There’s a bit of imposter syndrome…. I never really had a blueprint.”
Yet despite the smiles, despite the millions of followers on social media, the platinum records and billions of song streams, Aminé feels insecure—and he’s disarmingly candid about it. Just minutes into our conversation he says, “When you’re in the studio you can drive yourself crazy; you start to think: ‘Man, do I suck?’” He smiles. “Which is funny because I’ll watch other artists talking about staying confident and staying on your path, and that honestly is so much easier said than done. I think the bigger you get, the harder it is to believe in yourself, in a way. It’s like the bigger I get, the easier it can all come crumbling down.”
Where do these feelings come from? “There’s a bit of imposter syndrome,” he explains. Aminé grew up in Woodlawn, northeast Portland, far from the hip-hop capitals of the US. “I didn’t have anybody I knew that had done what I’d done before,” he says, “so I never really had a blueprint for that.”
( 1 ) Aminé is the stage name of Adam Aminé Daniel.
( 2 ) The newspaper Aminé is reading on the cover is The Good For You Post—a real publication he produced and distributed to fans at pop-ups in LA and New York City. It addresses topics as diverse as gentrification, supernovas and skating, includes recipes and a word search, and features an article written by his mother.
Aminé wears a jacket and vest by ISABEL MARANT, jeans by SUPREME and shoes by OUR LEGACY.
( 3 ) Continuum includes “Waiting on the World to Change,” John Mayer’s most successful single, both in terms of sales and chart positions. In 2007, it was the most-played song of the year on mainstream adult contemporary radio in the US.
( 4 ) In an interview with Genius, Aminé said of “Caroline”—his viral 2017 hit—“I wrote this song with the intention of hopefully making a modern-day ‘Billie Jean.'”
( 5 ) Aminé’s videos have also received praise from his peers, including Kendrick Lamar, whom he met for the first time in 2021. As he told Complex, “He walked up to me, and he was like, ‘Yo, I fuck with the creativity in the videos….’ He was talking to me in a very serious voice. It was like Yoda telling you that you’ve got the right path or something.”
( 6 ) Aminé’s latest collaboration is on New Balance’s 740v2 model, which he named the “BTEE740″ in honor of his high school, Benson Tech, acknowledging the impact it had on his start as a rapper. The sneakers draw inspiration from the school’s royal blue and orange colors.
That’s not to say he lacked a strong musical education—Aminé’s parents, who moved from Ethiopia to the US in 1990 (his mother is Ethiopian, his father Eritrean Ethiopian), played Ethiopian music at home, alongside the albums of Bob Marley. But Aminé credits his mom with getting him into a wider variety of music. He remembers sitting in the car with her singing along to John Mayer’s soulful soft rock album Continuum, and how she’d always buy the rap albums he wanted for Christmas.3 (A devout Christian, she’d buy the versions with explicit lyrics bleeped out.)
In high school, Aminé helped out running the school’s radio station, where he and his friends would write lyrics to go over popular rap instrumentals from artists like Future. “We did it as a joke and I realized, Oh, man, this rapping thing’s kinda fun. I like writing verses,” he says. “After high school ended I was like, I still wanna do this, so I bought some beats from people and kept trying to make it happen.” In case it didn’t work out, he enrolled in college, studying marketing at Portland State, but avoided the typical student lifestyle. “I did not party at all,” he says. “I was living with my parents, making music every day, trying to figure that part out.” This work ethic is another thing inherited from his mother, who worked graveyard shifts at the post office to support the family. “I really want to work myself to the bone—till I’m dead tired and I can’t work anymore,” he says.
“I feel my job as an artist is to always give people what they don’t know they need, rather than what they want.”
The result of these experimentations was a series of tracks that included “Caroline,” his breakout hit, which catapulted him out of college and onto the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for over half a year.4 The song hasn’t aged a day since, from its spare funk riff to Aminé’s acrobatic flow, which dances over the song’s slow, loping rhythm.
Every one of Aminé’s releases brings something new. “I love looking back at my discography and thinking that none of these albums sounds alike,” he says. “I feel my job as an artist is to always give people what they don’t know they need, rather than what they want. If people hear an album from you, the next thing they’re going to ask is: ‘Yo, can you make that again?’ And that’s not as fulfilling for the artist.” So, he followed up Good for You with Limbo in 2020, a more purist rap record which leans toward colder trap beats and broaches mature topics like systemic racism and the question of bringing children into this broken world. “My whole point was trying to make a classic hip-hop album,” he says. (He half-joked when it was released that his feel-good debut had far too many white fans, and Limbo was intended as a corrective.)
After each album, Aminé released a mixtape, first ONEPOINTFIVE and then TWOPOINTFIVE, which he sees as valves to release his creativity without the pressure of making some grand artistic statement. His self-imposed limitation for each of these projects is that he can only spend three months on it and that he must release it immediately afterward. His most recent full-length album was Kaytraminé, a collaboration with producer and early Aminé supporter Kaytranada. In 2021, following a period of lockdown-induced depression, the pair rented a house in Malibu and worked every day for two weeks, with Kaytranada making beats during the day and Aminé writing lyrics by night. The result is an unapologetic pool party record suffused with the elation of post-pandemic freedom, including memorable turns from guests including Snoop Dogg, Amaarae and Pharrell Williams.
While Aminé’s music stands on its own, he has also gained a reputation for his bold visual imagination, particularly communicated through his music videos.5 Each clip has a story to tell, with comedic skits, blindingly bright colors and inventive visual gags. They range from low-concept, such as when he and his friends cruise around eating bananas for “Caroline” or play tennis in the pastel-hued video for “Compensating,” to the more poignant, like the video for “REDMERCEDES,” where Aminé and his friends enter a car dealership in whiteface as a commentary on how wealthy people are treated differently depending on their race.
More recently, Aminé has been expanding into the world of fashion. Not content with being named one of the 10 best-dressed rappers by Complex, sitting front row at Jacquemus shows or inspiring Instagram accounts that identify his threads, Aminé has also launched his own merch brand, Club Banana, and recently turned to sneaker design with a series of New Balance collabs.6 It’s clear that his few years of studying marketing didn’t go to waste—in a gleeful fit of brand synergy, he’s wearing his own-brand sneakers in his recent music videos.
In 2024, Aminé started the Best Day Ever Fest, a music festival in his native Portland where he performed alongside Kaytranada, BADBADNOTGOOD and Toro y Moi.7 Some eager fans drove 30 hours just to see him play. He relocated to LA a few years ago, however, to be closer to the music industry and other business opportunities (though he also says trading decades of Portland’s “depressing weather” for Southern California sunshine sweetened the deal).
( 3 ) Continuum includes “Waiting on the World to Change,” John Mayer’s most successful single, both in terms of sales and chart positions. In 2007, it was the most-played song of the year on mainstream adult contemporary radio in the US.
( 4 ) In an interview with Genius, Aminé said of “Caroline”—his viral 2017 hit—“I wrote this song with the intention of hopefully making a modern-day ‘Billie Jean.'”
( 5 ) Aminé’s videos have also received praise from his peers, including Kendrick Lamar, whom he met for the first time in 2021. As he told Complex, “He walked up to me, and he was like, ‘Yo, I fuck with the creativity in the videos….’ He was talking to me in a very serious voice. It was like Yoda telling you that you’ve got the right path or something.”
( 6 ) Aminé’s latest collaboration is on New Balance’s 740v2 model, which he named the “BTEE740″ in honor of his high school, Benson Tech, acknowledging the impact it had on his start as a rapper. The sneakers draw inspiration from the school’s royal blue and orange colors.
He wears a jacket by GUESS USA, jeans by ACNE STUDIOS and shoes by PRADA.
Aminé wears a hat by ABELA023, sunglasses by JACQUEMUS, a coat by GUESS USA, a shirt by AFB, trousers by ISABEL MARANT and shoes by OUR LEGACY.
( 7 ) Tickets for the Best Day Ever Fest sold for $175–$250. The festival took place on the historic grounds of McMenamins Edgefield, a 74-acre resort in the Portland suburb of Troutdale, and is planned to return in 2025.
( 8 ) Aminé runs an Instagram account for his goldendoodle, @oliverthemenace. He told the zine Dog Bag, “The emotional support Oliver provides clears my head… which then leads to my best ideas.”
I WASN’T FLIMSY ABOUT ANYTHING, AND I ALWAYS GAVE IT MY ALL.
He lives there alone with his goldendoodle, Oliver. “I’m not one of those rappers who gets rid of my dog,” he says, laughing. He treats Oliver like a child, and his family follows suit.8 “Whenever I’m on a long tour I’ll fly my dog to Portland to stay with my parents, who treat him like a grandson.”
In terms of home life, Aminé says he struggles to keep a daily routine apart from his morning coffee and cigarette before he goes to record at the studio. He calls it a “real single lifestyle,” pronouncing the words in an uncharacteristically dejected way. “I recently went through a breakup after a long-term relationship. The single lifestyle as a 30-year-old man really isn’t my taste, I don’t love it as much, but yeah, I’ll figure it out.” Now he sits in a rare moment of silence, the strips of sunlight flashing across his face. He says that turning 30 this year has made him come over all reflective. “You start realizing: Man! I can’t bullshit no more!”
Is he starting to think more about his musical legacy? “I think about that every day with every decision I make,” he says. “I want people to know that I really cared about every creative decision, to know that I always made an effort, that I wasn’t flimsy about anything, and I always gave it my all and didn’t take any of it for granted.” He might be known for his humor, but Aminé clearly means this deeply. Suddenly his gaze shifts out of the car window, and he unclips his seatbelt. On to the next thing. He’s got a plane to catch.
( 7 ) Tickets for the Best Day Ever Fest sold for $175–$250. The festival took place on the historic grounds of McMenamins Edgefield, a 74-acre resort in the Portland suburb of Troutdale, and is planned to return in 2025.
( 8 ) Aminé runs an Instagram account for his goldendoodle, @oliverthemenace. He told the zine Dog Bag, “The emotional support Oliver provides clears my head… which then leads to my best ideas.”
