With its sweet melody over a beat made for couples’ dancing, Aya Nakamura’s track Djadja sounds, to anglophone ears, like a love song. With the video fast approaching 300m views on YouTube, this catchy afropop song made Nakamura’s the queen of the French urban music scene last year. But while the 23-year-old’s voice playfully switches between singing and soft rap, the bittersweet track finds Nakamura calling out a guy who has been lying about having sex with her. “You think about me while I think about making money,” she sings (in French), witheringly. “I’m not your mother / I’m not going to lecture you.”

The song has been hailed as an anthem for female empowerment and taken on a life of its own: Nakamura’s image was used on posters during recent French protests confronting violence against women. Yet the singer is equivocal about the reaction. “It’s cool to be able to represent black women in France,” she says, “but I have my own way of being, my own way of doing things. There’s a problem when people say, ‘You’re the only black woman representing’ – there are others too.”

Recently there has been a buzz around French artists breaking into foreign markets, including PNL, the Blaze and Christine and the Queens, but Aya represents something different. Determined and suburban, she talks about making money and dominating men much like Rihanna or Cardi B would. And unlike other French women who have come close to breaking international markets, she is not white, Arab or mixed race. She’s a black woman in an industry known to discriminate in favour of lighter-skinned artists. “Colourism exists in some way everywhere,” she says. “It’s really difficult when there are people trying to pressure you into bleaching your skin, because that’s what they want. You ask yourself: where are we? Why should I do that? This is how I am.”

She adds that an idealised image of the all-powerful black woman isn’t helpful. She recently refused a selfie with a fan in Senegal because she was tired from a flight. Media and fans branded her a snob. “People have this image of the black woman who can face anything, but we are just like everyone else.”

In fact Nakamura’s appeal lies partly in her demand for that kind of respect – in her song Copines, she shames a guy who has been checking out her friends – and in her music she doesn’t pretend to be approachable. She seems unfazed by the attention resulting from Djadja. “My concept isn’t about making everyone happy,” she says. “When I’m in the studio it’s about what I like ... I don’t worry about everyone getting what I’m saying.”

While she appeals to the frustrations that some listeners may share about men, Nakamura also has a softer side. Last month, she released a song called La Dot, about falling for a guy, getting a dowry and wanting “the dream life”. This might seem at odds with some people’s vision of female empowerment, but as a young French Malian woman, Nakamura has her own vision of fairytale romance that speaks to a generation of young women from north and west African backgrounds in France. It takes strong sense of autonomy and self-respect and mixes it with traditional values passed on from older generations.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I’ve always had quite a strong character.’

Born Aya Danioko in Mali – Nakamura was adopted as a stage name, inspired by a character from superhero drama Heroes – she came to live in Aulnay-sous-Bois in the suburbs of Paris with her family when she was a baby. Her mother was a griotte, a traditional Malian poet or singer. “If you come from a line of griots you’re automatically categorised by that,” she says. “They tell people’s stories in the villages, and basically performed the role of the media for previous generations.”

This played a big part in Nakamura’s life growing up in France. “On Sundays, the family would come together to eat a big lunch, or if there was a wedding my mum would sing there. They were ‘real’ [traditional] weddings too – that is to say, the groom’s family would have go and pay the family of the bride the dowry in order to marry her.”

In her house, uncles and aunts played a big role in teaching the younger ones about Malian culture. Did these women influence the no-nonsense attitude in her music? “No, that was me,” she says. “I’ve always had quite a strong character, ever since I was little.” She is interrupted by her two-year-old daughter. “It’s like having two jobs,” she says of her life as a parent and a rising star. “I work with my family; it’s very complicated but it’s OK.”

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Nakamura pushes back on the suggestion that she is continuing the griot tradition, clarifying that what she does is a little different. Her song about Grammy-award winning Malian singer Oumou Sangaré pays homage to a woman who she grew up admiring, and Sangaré features in the video for the track. “She’s a singer, a businesswoman and she really represents Malian women,” she says passionately. “I really went into fan mode when I met her – she was so beautiful and she really got what I was doing.”

Her success over the past year may have pushed her into the spotlight and exposed her to pressure to meet others’ expectations, but Nakamura is adamant that her motivation lies closer to home: “I really want to show my daughter my story and let her know who we are.”