May is New Zealand Music Month, and as always, I’m all for celebrating the towering cultural footprint little ol’ Aotearoa has made in the music scene with everything from Flying Nun Records to Lorde to Marlon Williams.
Something I love about New Zealand music is how much of it is, still, well, new to me, nearly 20 years after moving to this part of the world.
The music you listen to between the ages of roughly 12 and 20 sinks into your brain like quick-set concrete and hardens your musical tastes for life, whether you like it or not. I can’t hear the eerie beats that open “When The Doves Cry” or Madonna’s boppy “Lucky Star” without being a 12-year-old California kid again. Even the songs I don’t like take me back in time and strike a chord now that I’ve hit middle age.
I’ve long had a love for NZ music, as I’ve written before, ever since a high school girlfriend got me into Crowded House and the lovely woman I’d eventually marry introduced me to the antipodean cool of The Chills and The JPS Experience.
But I didn’t grow up with New Zealand music.
Because I didn’t grow up with all those catchy, kitschy ‘70s and ‘80s New Zealand-forged pop songs sputtering out of the radio, I still frequently stumble on ones that are new to me, like little glittering bits of buried treasure.
They’re coated in the sounds of their era, but because I didn’t have them filling up my head as a sponge-like teenager and come to them as an adult, they often sound like messages from an alternate universe where they might sit comfortably on Sacramento, California’s FM 102 right next to Hall and Oates and Rick Springfield.
The Kiwi bands that have made it big worldwide like Split Enz and Lorde are on one level, while the hits of The Dance Exponents, Dragon, Th’ Dudes and so many others are more bound to this part of the world. Sometimes I like to imagine what it would’ve been like to grow up in this strangely isolated island nation back when, as my wife often reminds me, there were only two television channels and instead of MTV, you had “Radio With Pictures” blasting out the latest videos.
There are hit songs like the 1983 Pātea Māori Club’s thumping “Poi E,” a one-hit wonder that was performed entirely in Māori and has the carefree swagger of The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” with an entirely Pacific spin. I know some people who hate this song because it was inescapable for a while here, and yet I listen to it with the novelty of discovery every time – a joyful indigenous song in a language I didn’t even know existed when I was 12 years old, but a huge hit on the other side of the globe.
…Or Hello Sailor’s smooth and sexy “Blue Lady,” which sounds a little like the greatest Steely Dan song I never heard, a gem that reeks of secondhand smoke and stale VB beers.
As a big fan of nerdy synth-pop of the age like Soft Cell and the Human League, I was delighted to stumble on Mi-Sex’s catchy stuttering 1979 single “Computer Games.” It felt like stumbling on an old Commodore 64 game setup in a closet I’d forgotten I owned.
Twenty years into my life here, I still find new novelties – recently the ‘80s NZ band The Crocodiles re-released their discography down here and I rather loved their new-to-me sappy ballad “Tears,” (Crocodile Tears, get it?) which could sit comfortably with Air Supply’s “All Out Of Love” and Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” as anguished lovelorn transmissions from 1983 or so.
I wouldn’t argue that all the new-to-me Kiwi tunes of yesterday I stumble across are necessarily better than the Cyndi Lauper and Prince and Huey Lewis I grew up with. Some of it’s sappy and some of it’s daft and some of it’s lame … and some of it is great.
But they are all distinctly Aotearoa sounds, birthed and sung here at the far end of the world. New Zealand Music Month is as good a time as any to crank up the wireless and enjoy it all, eh mate?
Nik Dirga 