This podcast explores the vibrant roots of New Zealand’s hip hop scene

Within the late Seventies and early 80s, hip hop started spreading the world over from its birthplace in New York Metropolis. As pioneers of the style comparable to Afrika Bambaataa and Fab 5 Freddy hit the shores of Europe in 1982, rap, breakdancing, DJing, and graffiti had been already making waves, in all places from the UK to New Zealand.

A brand new podcast from Phil Bell, AKA DJ Sir-Vere, in collaboration with author and Dazed contributor Martyn Pepperell, particularly hones in on Aotearoa hip hop (Aotearoa being the Māori title for New Zealand). Over the course of two, six-episode seasons, it traces how the style landed in New Zealand — courtesy of taped radio exhibits and hit songs by the likes of The Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash — and took the nation by storm.

Titled Aotearoa Hip Hop: The Music, The People, The History, the documentary-style podcast goes on to doc the “creative golden period” of the late 90s and early 2000s, when New Zealand hip hop impressed a number of of the nation’s most profitable acts of the period, comparable to South Auckland’s Savage, “How Bizarre” hitmakers OMC, and Sisters Underground.

To inform this story, the present mines the insider data gained by DJ Sir-Vere as a music fan, hip hop artist, and former editor of the enduring New Zealand music journal Rip It Up. Reflecting his place on the forefront of the motion, it additionally options the voices of among the scene’s most vital figures and unsung heroes.

“We had been each already fairly fluent within the historical past,” Pepperell tells Dazed. “However within the means of interviewing over 100 folks, we realised that there was much more happening than we initially realised, and it wanted to be thought of in a severe and significant method.”

In fact, US hip hop supplied disenfranchised youth — usually from marginalised communities whose voices had been not often heard within the mainstream — a platform to talk out towards racism and different types of oppression. Equally, in New Zealand, the subculture supplied many Māori and Pasifika children a possibility to focus on the social challenges and discrimination they confronted.

Within the second episode of Aotearoa Hip Hop, Māori musician and activist Dean Hapeta (AKA D Phrase of Higher Hutt Posse) remembers being known as a racial slur by a white motorbike gang member, on the age of eight. Law enforcement officials used related language towards his youthful brother, he says. Later within the collection, Samoan rappers together with Scribe, Dei Hamo, and Ermehn additionally talk about preventing with racist skinheads and neo-Nazi gangs whereas touring New Zealand’s South Island.

“It might be deeply naive to counsel that racism is over in New Zealand,” Pepperell says, however he notes the tradition that grew round hip hop has helped transfer the dial in the proper course. Beneath, Dazed talks to Pepperell about his podcast with DJ Sir-Vere, the open racism that younger folks have confronted in New Zealand, and the way hip hop helped push again.

What sparked Aotearoa Hip Hop, and the way did you become involved?

DJ Sir-Vere requested me to come back aboard as the author in late 2019. His proposal was a documentary type podcast collection in regards to the historical past of hip hop in New Zealand. This wasn’t going to be a collection of one-on-one interviews, it was going to be a completely produced and narrated manufacturing. I used to be initially fairly daunted, however I additionally favored the sound of doing one thing like this. 

We’d beforehand labored collectively within the late 2000s and early 2010s when he was working because the editor of New Zealand based mostly hip hop journal known as Back2Basics and in a while at Rip It Up, New Zealand’s longest working music journal.

It’s been over three a long time because the Wellington group Higher Hutt Posse launched New Zealand’s first ever hip hop single, “E Tu”, so it felt like time to take inventory and mirror on the historical past and legacy of the style on this nation.

How did you select what tales and personalities to incorporate within the podcast?

The very first thing we did was put collectively a tough timeline of what we thought the story of hip hop in New Zealand seemed like. After that, we went away and began interviewing the important thing figures within the scene. In the event that they talked about somebody or one thing fascinating, we’d go and examine that and see the place it led us. 

Placing this collectively through the pandemic was very difficult and I freely admit there have been interviews we didn’t handle to safe or couldn’t fairly work out, however we nonetheless ended up speaking to over 100 folks from the previous few a long time. 

For me, among the actual joys had been studying extra in regards to the late 70s and early 80s nightclub scenes in New Zealand, discovering out how the native children acquired maintain of music from abroad, and studying extra a few collection of fascinating cultural connections between New Zealand, Samoa, and America. Lots of the interviewees describe the early days as naive, however they had been lovely as nicely.

“Generally essentially the most radical method to push again is to — figuring out very nicely that your enemies or oppressors are watching — proceed to social gathering and have enjoyable” — Martyn Pepperell

Briefly, how did hip hop assist form the youth tradition of New Zealand?

From the second that hip hop and breakdancing arrived in New Zealand within the late 70s, the youth of this nation embraced it. They liked how the music made them really feel, the way it allowed them to decorate, and the way it allow them to specific themselves by means of music, dance and artwork. In 2021, we reside in a hip hop world. On this sense, the way in which hip hop linked with native youth — who ultimately labored out how one can reinterpret it in their very own signature types, and greater than that, use it as a method to have monetary company — is a narrative that has performed out in similar-but-different methods throughout the globe.

Are you able to inform us extra in regards to the discrimination Māori and Pasifika children confronted within the early days of New Zealand’s hip hop scene?

Whereas their era was rising up within the 70s and 80s, racism was open, express, and sometimes went unchecked. These experiences led Dean (Hapeta) and his contemporaries towards the writing of Black American activists comparable to Malcom X and Bobby Seale from the Black Panther social gathering. They noticed commonalities between what these thinkers had been articulating and their on a regular basis expertise, which helped inform how they approached and engaged with the challenges they confronted on this planet round them. 

In the course of the seventies, a gaggle of younger Pasifika males based an organisation known as The Polynesian Panther Get together in Auckland, who borrowed pondering and frameworks from The Black Panther Get together earlier than remaking them in their very own modes. (The Polynesian Panther Get together was additionally partly fashioned in response to the disproportionate concentrating on of Pacific Islanders in “daybreak raids” towards those that had overstayed work visas.)

Fittingly, the kids of the Polynesian Panthers had been among the first and second era of hip hop artists in New Zealand.

How did hip hop assist push again towards this discrimination?

Folks discuss hip hop as this wonderful international phenomenon, which positive, it’s. On the identical time, while you have a look at the situations it emerged inside all through many nations around the globe, it appears fairly elementary that the true international phenomenon is oppression and discrimination. Hip hop was a method to battle again. I’m not simply speaking about political or social hip hop both. Generally essentially the most radical method to push again is to — figuring out very nicely that your enemies or oppressors are watching — proceed to social gathering and have enjoyable.

(Within the late 70s and early 80s) hip hop was the brand new cool, and whether or not you’re speaking about dancing, rapping, or DJing, Māori and Pasifika children had been shortly streets forward of the white New Zealand youth. 

All through the interviews we performed, there have been just a few frequent threads. One in all them was how hip hop helped era after era of native rappers, DJs, producers, and dancers construct up their confidence and shallowness. Past that, it gave them a platform to say the issues they wanted to say. Exterior of music, the perspective of hip hop bled into the native arts, movie and TV, trend, and publishing industries, giving rise to new generations who had extra of a global consciousness and had been much less prepared to just accept the racism and discrimination of earlier years.

It might be deeply naive to counsel that racism is over in New Zealand, particularly in gentle of ongoing institutional and structural points the nation’s indigenous Māori and Pasifika populations, and immigrant teams, proceed to face. A lot of (these points) have been thrown into a pointy gentle over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. That stated, successive generations have continued to maneuver the dial and act as of brokers of change towards ongoing cultural and social shifts.

“Hip hop was the brand new cool, and whether or not you’re speaking about dancing, rapping, or DJing, Māori and Pasifika children had been shortly streets forward of the white New Zealand youth” — Martyn Pepperell

What do you hope that individuals unfamiliar with NZ tradition will take away from the podcast?

You don’t should be a hip hop fan to benefit from the tales shared on this documentary podcast and equally, I don’t assume it’s worthwhile to already be invested in New Zealand hip hop to attach with it. I believe for these outdoors of New Zealand, it’s a unique lens to make use of to have a look at a set of themes which have performed out in several methods proper around the globe. The music and the individuals who made it have their very own charms as nicely, so hopefully you’ll come away with just a few albums you’d wish to hearken to, or as a minimum, some songs so as to add to your playlists. 

You possibly can hearken to the primary season of Aotearoa Hip Hop here. The second season is scheduled to be launched in 2022.