The music of New Zealand has been influenced by a number of traditions, including Māori music, the music introduced by European settlers during the nineteenth century, and a variety of styles imported during the twentieth century, including blues, jazz, country, rock and roll, reggae, and hip hop, with many of these genres given a unique New Zealand interpretation.
OMC, or Otara Millionaires Club, were a New Zealander music group, then duo, with vocalist Pauly Fuemana later becoming the sole member. OMC was best known for the 1995 hit "How Bizarre", named one of the greatest New Zealander songs of all time by the Australasian Performing Right Association. The full name of the band is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Otara's status as one of the poorest suburbs of Auckland.
Che Kuo Eruera Ness, better known by his stage name Che Fu, is a New Zealand hip hop, R&B and reggae artist, songwriter and producer. A founding member of the band Supergroove, as a solo artist he has gone on to sell thousands of albums both in New Zealand and internationally. Che Fu is considered a pioneer of Hip hop and Pasifika music in New Zealand.
The music of Niue has a long history. Niue is a Polynesian island in the South Pacific. Though independent, it is in free association with New Zealand.
New Zealand hip hop derives from the wider hip hop cultural movement originating amongst African Americans in the United States. Like the parent movement, New Zealand hip hop consists of four parts: rapping, DJing, graffiti art and breakdancing. The first element of hip hop to reach New Zealand was breakdancing, which gained notoriety after the release of the 1979 movie The Warriors. The first hip hop hit single, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang, became a hit in New Zealand when it was released there in 1980, a year after it was released in the United States. By the middle of the 1980s, breakdancing and graffiti art were established in urban areas like Wellington and Christchurch. By the early 1990s hip hop became a part of mainstream New Zealand culture.
Urban Pasifika is a New Zealand subgenre of hip hop, that developed primarily among Pasifika New Zealanders in South Auckland. Drawn from alternative hip hop and R&B influences, it was quickly blended with Pacific Island or Māori instrumentation and traditional songwriting and singing and rapping in a variety of Polynesian languages, such as Māori, Samoan, Niuean and Tongan. The genre's genesis in the 1980s blossomed into a unique, globally enrapturing cultural scene in its homeland of Auckland, especially in the next decade. Urban Pasifika is one of the most popular music genres to arise from New Zealand, and helped cement Auckland's reputation on the world stage as a major cultural centre, and the most ethnically Polynesian city in the world.
Paul Lawrence Fuemana was a New Zealander singer, songwriter and musician from Auckland. One of the first globally successful pioneers of his country's unique style of hip-hop, Fuemana was one of New Zealand's greatest popular music icons of the 1990s.
Simon Grigg is a New Zealand music businessman, writer, broadcaster, publisher, producer, DJ and archivist. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, he attended Palmerston North Boys High, Auckland Grammar and the University of Auckland.
Dawn Raid Entertainment is a record label based in Papatoetoe, South Auckland, in New Zealand. It has signed many New Zealand Hip-hop and R&B artists such as Savage, Adeaze, Aaradhna, The Deceptikonz, Devolo and Ill Semantics. The founders of Dawn Raid Entertainment announced the closure of the recording label on 19 April 2007 due to liquidation.
Sisters Underground was a New Zealand hip hop and R&B duo best known for their 1994 single "In the Neighbourhood".
Tim Mahon is a New Zealand musician who played in the Plague, the Whizz Kids and Blam Blam Blam. He was seriously injured in a road accident while on tour with Blam Blam Blam, leading to the band breaking up.
AK79 is a collection of unreleased tracks by punk bands active in Auckland, New Zealand in the late 1970s. The album was compiled by Bryan Staff, with artwork from Terence Hogan, and was released by Ripper Records in December 1979.
David Keith Dallas is a hip hop artist from New Zealand of Samoan and European descent.
Deepgrooves was an Auckland, New Zealand-based independent record label formed in 1991 by Bill Lattimer, Mark Tierney and Kane Massey. Tierney left the label eighteen months after the initial release and Lattimer followed two months later. Massey continued with the label for approximately ten years working as producer or executive producer on over 20 albums. Deepgrooves is widely seen as being one of the labels at the forefront of the birth of New Zealand's modern music industry in the early 1990s.
The Pacific Music Awards are an annual New Zealand music award ceremony since 2005 that honours excellence in Pacific music in New Zealand. The awards honour musicians who primarily work in the Pacific Island style of music from the Cook Islands, Fiji, Niue, Samoa, Tonga, Tokelau or Tuvalu, and also in urban and gospel genre categories.
Double J and Twice the T was a New Zealand hip hop duo, best known for their 1989 #2 charting song "She's A Mod/Mod Rap", a hip hop reworking of Ray Columbus & the Invaders' 1964 cover of "She's a Mod". They are also known for their 1990 eco anthem "Def to be Green" in which they teamed up with Auckland Regional Council's water conservation mascot Robert D Frogg.
Philip Fuemana was a New Zealand musician. Affectionately known as "the Godfather of South Auckland", he was highly regarded for his work in South Auckland in establishing the Urban Pasifika sound.
"In the Neighbourhood" is the 1994 debut single by the New Zealand hip hop duo Sisters Underground. The song peaked at #6 in the New Zealand singles charts and is now regarded as a landmark single both in the emerging South Auckland music scene of the 1990s and for New Zealand music as a whole.
"On the Run" is a song by Niuean-New Zealand singer-songwriter Pauly Fuemana, as part of his music project OMC, short for Otara Millionaires Club. One of OMC's most successful singles other than their worldwide smash hit, "How Bizarre", it received high acclaim, and was considered the stand out of the album, from which it came. The song reached number 56 in the United Kingdom, number 30 in New Zealand, and number 82 in Germany.
Pasifika New Zealanders are a pan-ethnic group of New Zealanders associated with, and descended from, the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands outside of New Zealand itself. They form the fourth-largest ethnic grouping in the country, after European-descended Pākehā, indigenous Māori, and Asian New Zealanders. There are over 380,000 Pasifika people in New Zealand, with the majority living in Auckland. 8% of the population of New Zealand identifies as being of Pacific origin.
