The 22-year-old rapper is so popular he recently played three sold-out concerts in Hungary's largest stadiums, and even Prime Minister Orban Viktor, a conservative defender of traditional values ​​known for being out of sympathy with young people and their culture, claims to be a fan.
Orban has said he is particularly fond of the song “Rampapapam,” a reggae-style ode to the joys of marijuana — a surprising choice given the prime minister's conservative views, raising questions about whether he actually listened to the song or just saw a video of the musician playing soccer, the leader's favorite sport.
But Hungarian superstar Attila Bauko, better known as Azaria, has amassed such a devoted fanbase in Hungary that Mr Orban, who has been in power for 14 years, seems to want some of the rapper's energy and stardust.
“I see that there are a lot of people who like me, so they try to be friendly,” Azaria said in an interview backstage before a concert last month at Budapest's Puskas Arena sports stadium, which drew about 50,000 people on each of the three nights he performed.
Azaria said the official endorsement “should be a happy thing, but it feels strange and uncomfortable to see so many young supporters dislike the ruling Fidesz party.”
When tickets for the prime minister's most recent concert sold out within minutes of going on sale in October, Orbán's office featured an image of the singer and a “sold out” sign in a TikTok video promoting the prime minister's speech.
The video was later removed after a torrent of online ridicule. Azaria sold 138,800 tickets online, but only a few thousand people showed up to hear Orbán perform his hit songs, a familiar list of grievances against the European Union.
Azaria first came to public attention 10 years ago, at age 12, when he started his YouTube channel. He occasionally played guitar but mostly just talked, and drew a young following with videos about his struggles at school in Budapest's Újpalota district, a low-income neighborhood of concrete Communist-era apartment blocks.
His personal story resonated: his parents were divorced, and he was raised primarily by his mother, an officer in the Hungarian army, and his father, following in the footsteps of many Hungarians disappointed with their prospects in their home country, emigrated to Germany to work as a mechanic.
Taking the name Azariah, a biblical name meaning “helped by God,” he became a showbiz sensation, teaming up with already established artist Desh to record his first hit song, “Meadow,” in 2020. His first album, “I'm Worse,” was a collection of mostly English songs.
He then switched to Hungarian and “Hanglish”, a mix of the two languages, occasionally mixed with Spanish and Romani as well.
His song quickly rose to the top of the Hungarian charts. Earlier this month, four of the top five most-streamed songs on Spotify in Hungary were by him. Asked by Hungarian media to explain the phenomenon, which is happening so quickly, psychologists described it as “mass psychosis.”
Azalia's manager, Gergely Toth, recalls that when he first signed Azalia three years ago, he was a niche artist playing concerts in front of 1,500 people.
“I'm in the middle of this whole thing and it's hard to explain what happened,” Toth said. “People are cheering for him the same way they cheer for the Hungarian national football team.”
But politics have prevented Azaria from ever representing Hungary in the Eurovision Song Contest, Europe's World Cup for music. Alarmed by Eurovision's reputation as Europe's biggest gay event, authorities ended Hungary's participation in the annual contest in 2020.
“It would have been amazing to win Eurovision as a straight white male,” Azaria said.
David Sayo, entertainment editor at the popular Hungarian online publication Telex, said that while he is not a big fan himself, he praised Azaria for broadening Hungarian music's horizons by mixing genres such as Afrobeat, Caribbean ska and Latin music that are “very basic and common in the West, but unique here.”
Sajo said Azaria's big break came in 2022, the year of a scandal that could have ended the careers of many others: A video of the artist engaging in a sexual act with a female fan backstage after a concert at a local pancake festival was released online.
“Suddenly his name was in every gossip magazine, in every major newspaper, on every Internet site, every day,” Sajo said. “Before that he was just a Gen Z celebrity. Then he became a national A-list superstar.”
Azaria said the incident was embarrassing but acknowledged that it “spread my popularity.”
His most ardent fans are young women like Luka Xeres, a 20-year-old aspiring kindergarten teacher from a small town in northern Hungary, who bought tickets to all three of his last concerts and slept on the sidewalk outside the Puskas Arena to be at the front of the queue for each one.
She said no other artist, not even fellow fan Taylor Swift, resonates with her as much as she does with Azalea because he sings about “real things in my life” – in one song he talks about growing up in Uzipalota.
She had been watching his YouTube channel for years, but was really hooked when he released the mournful track “Mind1” with Desh in 2021. She recalled that she was going through a difficult time at home at the time, and related to the lyrics, “Every night I wait to see what tomorrow will bring, But I know in the end it will all be the same.”
But his fans include older people too. Julia Bakos, a 50-year-old economist, is one of them. She recently went to a concert with her 10-year-old son. She said her musical tastes had previously included the 1980s British band Depeche Mode and the communist-era group Hungaria, but she became obsessed with Azaria because “there's something for everyone” and they constantly switch between genres and languages.
And unlike many stars, she said, he “seems like a great guy” willing to transcend political and generational barriers.
At a recent concert, he told the crowd that some fans would like him to talk more about politics, but that it's not his job.
His occasional political interventions avoid personal insults and are born primarily of his disgust with what he calls “the combative atmosphere between bitterly rival political camps” in Hungary.
“Musicians are not obliged to talk about politics,” he says. “If you have nothing to say, that's fine. But in a free country, it's not okay to stay silent because you're worried about damaging your career. We're not in Russia.”
In February, Orbán joined public outrage over the pardon of a man convicted of covering up pedophile abuse in orphanages, a furore that forced Hungarian President Katalin Novak, a close ally of Orbán, to resign.
“There are some issues that are way above the moral standards I can accept,” he recalled.
Some of Orban's supporters tried to discredit his intervention by reviving his own scandal and portraying him as a sexual abuser, but they quickly abandoned the effort, which only strengthened public support for the musician.
“Azaria is one of the few people in Hungary who can't be destroyed by Fidesz,” entertainment editor Sajo said. “The party knows he's too popular to touch.”
Film producer Balász Levay, who is making a film about the artist, said he struggled to understand Azaria's appeal but decided “he's like a guy from a Hungarian fairy tale, someone who comes out of nowhere and becomes everybody's hero.”