Sixteen-year-old Nene Royal of Phuket, Thailand, became the
grand champion of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” on Sept. 23. (Photo: Courtesy of NBC)
The teen from Thailand is crowned as the show’s Season 21 queen.
By Gil Asakawa, P.C. Contributor
She has been a viral sensation mesmerizing anyone who watches the reality-TV competition “America’s Got Talent” on NBC, as well as heavy metal rock fans who might think that the show’s too corny and mainstream Vegas-y. But Nene Royal, a 16-year-old from Phuket, Thailand, has upended all stereotypes and expectations, and on Sept. 23, she was crowned the season’s Grand Champion, taking home the show’s $1 million prize and a headlining gig in Las Vegas.
Rattikarn Amloy, who has gone by the stage name Nene Royal since she was 12, was just 15 when she appeared before the AGT judges for her audition performance.
Dressed in a demure lacy black dress and holding an electric guitar, she appeared shy and nervous, grateful for the opportunity to play her music. She told the judges — Mel B, Simon Cowell, Howie Mandel and Sofía Vergara — when they asked how old she was that the next day was her birthday and she would turn 16. She was adorable and polite, like an Asian stereotype.
When she began her audition, though, her reserve melted away, and she shocked the judges, the audience and the world with raging guitar riffing that exploded into a full-throated heavy-metal scream the likes of which just don’t appear on primetime network television.
Judges and audience members were slack-jawed with disbelief that this young woman was cranking out such an unexpected blast of raucous rock.
Then, she slowed the song down to the verse and chorus of the Cranberries’ postpunk classic anti-war track “Zombie.” The judges all voted “yes” to pass her on to the next round. Mandell even said that he would get in trouble, but NBC should give her a million bucks right then.
Her talent, passion and commitment, as well as professionalism, was a surprise for viewers, but in her hometown, she’d been honing her chops literally for years.
Nene Royal displays the envelope proclaiming her the winner the latest season of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent.” (Photo: Trae Patton/NBC)
Royal started plucking her guitar strings when she was just 7 years old, and by the time she was 10, she was learning to sing Western rock songs, sometimes with the help of an English teacher friend who danced to her performances. She also took music classes in school but mostly learned guitar from watching and listening to videos of her favorite songs online.
There are more than a thousand videos of Royal playing on YouTube (1,256 just on her channel, https://www.youtube.com/@neneroyalmusic), so it’s too easy to dive down the rabbit hole of her creative output, from a preteen nailing the solos of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” to covering Micheal Jackson’s “Beat It” and even expanding on Eddie Van Halen’s famous lead guitar on the song.
She covers the bases of all her favorite metal music, from Metallica and AC/DC to Deep Purple, Guns N’ Roses and Led Zeppelin. She also has stylistic range, playing blues, country rock, Queen (she got an approving comment from Queen guitarist Brian May for her version of “Bohemian Rhapsody”), Santana, ’80s rock like Bon Jovi and more modern rockers like the Cranberries, Lady Gaga, Green Day, White Stripes and Linkin Park.
For her judges’ callback song, she ripped into Muse’s “Hysteria,” then for the quarterfinals she destroyed Soundgarden’s intense “Black Hole Sun,” which led to judge Mel B slamming the Golden Buzzer to send her straight to the Grand Finale.
In the first-part finale on Sept. 22, Royal performed the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army,” which almost every sports fan across the world now recognizes for its wordless rhythmic baseline as a chant or marching band melody.
She rocked it out with the Whites Stripes’ words and her own shrieking guitar. The next night, she jammed with Mike Shinoda’s band Linkin Park, which had just come off a world tour and is about to release a new album. Following that and other post-finale performances, “AGT” announced that Royal had received the most votes from U.S. viewers to win the title of Season 21 champ.
She’s already a superstar with the U.S. Thai community and in her home country. A couple hundred people welcomed her back to LAX for the finals, and for the performance, she wore a Thai-style dress conceived by her mom (her parents traveled with her for every trip) and made using deep-red Thai silk.
Now, her silky career is paved with gold. But with her years of woodshedding — she’d been playing every Friday night at a Phuket night market and then on Saturdays and Sundays at another Phuket night market, often with her schoolmates, calling themselves OZONE Band (they competed in a kids’ music contest early on) — she’s not facing the challenges of being a rock star as a rookie.
It has been her goal all along, and she even was able to fly the members of OZONE Band to Los Angeles to join her to play an aftershow party at a Thai restaurant following her crowning. She has already been named a tourism ambassador by the Thai government, and she was awarded a long-term scholarship for her education by a Thai billionaire and has an American benefactor who has set up a website with merchandising and handled her application and contract negotiations with “AGT.”
Next-day reports reveal that her $1 million prize isn’t as incredible as it seems. She can get it as an annuity, getting $20K a month for 50 years, meaning she’ll get something like minimum wage until she’s 65, or as a lump sum, which with taxes and fees would come out to closer to $150K. But she doesn’t really need the prize money. Since her goals is to tour as a “rock star,” she will do fine.
And if her video of her first original song on YouTube, “Real Verse,” a bluesy metal instrumental that’s catchy enough to hook listeners, is a peek at her talent as a songwriter, her life won’t be about covering her favorite rock ’n’ roll songs. She’ll be making her own kind of music and leaving a legacy for the next generations of musical dreamers to latch on to as well.