Samoan hip hop includes hip-hop music, artists and culture in Samoa. At the root of hip hop culture in Samoa is a focus on dancing, stemming from the importance of dance in traditional Samoan culture. According to Katerina Teaiwa from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, hip hop culture is important for Samoan youth and the arts are transforming Samoans, including those outside of Samoa. [1] This is especially visible among Samoan youth in California, Hawaii, and other communities in the Samoan diaspora. In Los Angeles, Samoan youth often engage in a style of hip hop dancing called popping-and-locking.
According to April Henderson, young, recently-arrived Samoans in multi-ethnic neighborhoods seek status and respect by mastery of the "physical vocabularies" of dance or sport, aware of the accents that mark them as 'foreign'. [2] Many hip hop artists and dancers travel back and forth between Samoa and their other homes, creating channels for Samoan hip hop to continue to develop and transform.
In the 2009 novel, South Pacific Survivor: In Samoa, Poly hip-hop is central to the assassin, a troubled character. [3]
Samoa, officially the Independent State of Samoa and known until 1997 as Western Samoa, is an island country in Polynesia, consisting of two main islands ; two smaller, inhabited islands ; and several smaller, uninhabited islands, including the Aleipata Islands. Samoa is located 64 km west of American Samoa, 889 km northeast of Tonga, 1,152 km northeast of Fiji, 483 km east of Wallis and Futuna, 1,151 km southeast of Tuvalu, 519 km south of Tokelau, 4,190 km southwest of Hawaii, and 610 km northwest of Niue. The capital and largest city is Apia. The Lapita people discovered and settled the Samoan Islands around 3,500 years ago. They developed a Samoan language and Samoan cultural identity.
The music of Polynesia is a diverse set of musical traditions from islands within a large area of the central and southern Pacific Ocean, approximately a triangle with New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island forming its corners. Traditional Polynesian music is largely an inseparable part of a broader performance art form, incorporating dance and recital of oral traditions; most literature considers Polynesian music and dance together. Polynesian music expanded with colonial European contact and incorporated instruments and styles introduced through a process of acculturation that continues to the present day. Although the European tradition of hymn-singing brought by Christian missionaries was probably the most important influence, others are evident; Hawaii's influential kī hōʻalu music incorporated the Spanish guitar introduced in the late 19th century, and later introduced the steel guitar to country music. Hip hop and R&B influences have created a contemporary Urban Pasifika music genre with a strong Polynesian identity and supported by the annual Pacific Music Awards in New Zealand.
Kwaito is a music genre that emerged in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa, between the late 1980s and 1990s. It is a variant of house music that features the use of African sounds and samples. Kwaito songs occur at a slower tempo range than other styles of house music and often contain catchy melodic and percussive loop samples, deep bass lines and vocals. They are also very similar tempos to early 1990s NYC house tracks.
The Music of Samoa is a complex mix of cultures and traditions, with pre- and post-European contact histories. Since American colonization, popular traditions such as rap and hip hop have been integrated into Samoan music.
Festál is a free series of annual ethnically-related festivals that take place on the grounds of Seattle Center in Seattle, Washington. A major cultural program of Seattle, these festivals aim to celebrate and connect the city to its varied ethnic and international community. Most festivals contain various arts performances, dances, marketplace and other programs. These have also come to be the annual gathering place for ethnic groups of the community. Both older and younger people attend, especially the dances and musical concerts.
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.
Samoan Americans are Americans of Samoan origin, including those who emigrated from the United States Territory of American Samoa and immigrants from the Independent State of Samoa to the United States. Samoan Americans are Pacific Islanders in the United States census, and are the second largest Pacific Islander group in the US, after Native Hawaiians.
Hip hop or hip-hop is a culture and art movement that was created by African Americans, and Caribbean Americans starting in the Bronx, New York City. Pioneered from Black and Caribbean American street culture, that had been around for years prior to its more mainstream discovery.. Hip-hop culture has historically been shaped and dominated by African American men, though female hip hop artists have contributed to the art form and culture as well. Hip hop culture is characterized by the key elements of rapping, DJing and turntablism, and breakdancing; other elements include graffiti, beatboxing, street entrepreneurship, hip hop language, and hip hop fashion. From hip hop culture emerged a new genre of popular music, hip hop music.
Iranian hip hop, also known as Persian hip hop, refers to hip hop music in the Persian language developed in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. It originated from American hip hop culture, but has developed into a distinct rap style that draws on Iranian cultural concepts and engages with the modern issues Iranians are facing today.
Bill Rangi Urale, known by his stage name King Kapisi, is a New Zealand hip hop recording artist. He was the first hip hop artist in New Zealand to receive the Silver Scroll Award at the APRA Awards for Songwriter of the Year for his single Reverse Resistance in 1999.
Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. is an American hip hop band from Carson, California, consisting of the American Samoan brothers Paul, Ted, Donald, Roscoe, Danny, David and Vincent Devoux. They are known for combining funk and metal influences, with gangsta rap lyricism.
The first hip hop summit in NZ was organised by the late Philip Fuemana in 1996 & 1997 that honors the hip hop scene in New Zealand. In August 2000, a new group of hiphoppers started it back up under Aotearoa hip hop summit which took place at the Lumiere Theatre in Christchurch. The second summit, in September 2001, took place in Auckland.
Rough Opinion, formerly known as The Mau, is a Samoan Hip hop group comprising MC’s Kosmo, “Khas the Fieldstyle Orator,” and DJ Rockit V. Created in 1990, in Wellington, New Zealand, the group first named themselves The Mau, as they took their name from the Samoan organization that agitated the country’s independence under both German and New Zealand colonial governments. The decision of the group members to invoke Samoan colonial history, even though the group name was Samoa-specific, demonstrates the clear influence of the United States on Samoan hip hop, in that “there was a movement of Black consciousness in America at the time, and this became fuel for through for Kosmo’s crew whose motto became that of the Mau movement in Samoa-Samoa Mo Samoa, Samoa for Samoans.”
Steve da Silva', better known as Suga Pop, is an American "street dance" practitioner and choreographer based in the United States. He is known for his work in "popping" and "locking", styles of dance collectively grouped under the umbrella term "funk styles". These styles are associated with the U.S. West Coast, particularly California. He has been affiliated with the performance groups Electric Boogaloos and Rock Steady Crew.
Eyez on the Prize is a hip hop compilation album released April 13, 1999 by the Trump Tight record label.
The Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture (FestPAC), also known as the Pacific Arts Festival, is a travelling festival hosted every four years in Oceania. It was conceived by the Pacific Community as a means to stem erosion of traditional cultural practices by sharing and exchanging culture at each festival. The major theme of the festival is traditional song and dance.
Hip-hop or hip hop, formerly known as disco rap, is a genre of popular music, that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s primarily from African American, Afro-Latin, and Afro-Caribbean musical aesthetics practiced by youth in the South Bronx. Hip-hop music originated as an anti-drug and anti-violence social movement led by the Afrika Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation. The genre is characterized by stylized rhythmic sounds—often built around disco grooves, electronic drum beats, and rapping, a percussive vocal delivery of rhymed poetic speech as consciousness-raising expression. The music developed as part of the broader hip-hop culture, a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements: MCing/rapping, DJing/scratching with turntables, breakdancing, and graffiti art or writing. Knowledge is sometimes described as a fifth element, underscoring its role in shaping the values and promoting empowerment and consciousness-raising through music. In 1999, emcee KRS-One, often referred to as "The Teacher," elaborated on this framework in a Harvard lecture, identifying additional elements that extend beyond the basic four. These include self-expression, street fashion, street language, street knowledge, and street entrepreneurialism, which remain integral to hip-hop's musical expression, entertainment business, and sound production. Girls’ double-dutch was also recognized as a key stylistic component of breakdancing, according to KRS. While often used to refer solely to rapping and rap music, "hip-hop" more properly denotes the practice(s) of the entire subculture. The term hip-hop music is sometimes used synonymously with the term rap music, though rapping may not be the focus of hip-hop music. The genre also centers DJing, turntablism, scratching, beatboxing, and instrumental tracks.
Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa was an I-Kiribati and African-American scholar, poet, activist and mentor. Teaiwa was well-regarded for her ground-breaking work in Pacific Studies. Her research interests in this area embraced her artistic and political nature, and included contemporary issues in Fiji, feminism and women's activism in the Pacific, contemporary Pacific culture and arts, and pedagogy in Pacific Studies. An "anti-nuclear activist, defender of West Papuan independence, and a critic of militarism", Teaiwa solidified many connections across the Pacific Ocean and was a hugely influential voice on Pacific affairs Her poetry remains widely published.
Shigeyuki "Yuki" Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent. In 2008, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; it was the first time a New Zealander and the first time a Pacific Islander had a solo show at the institution. Titled Shigeyuki Kihara: Living Photographs, the exhibition opened from 7 October 2008 to 1 February 2009. Kihara's self-portrait photographs in the exhibitions included nudes in poses that portrayed colonial images of Polynesian people as sexual objects. Her exhibition was followed by an acquisition of Kihara's work for the museum's collection.
Katerina Teaiwa, is a Pacific scholar, artist and teacher of Banaban, I-Kiribati and African American heritage. Teaiwa is well known for her scholarly and artistic work that focuses on the history of British Phosphate Commissioners mining activity in the Pacific during the 1900s and the consequent displacement of Banabans. In 2022, she became the first Indigenous woman from the Pacific to win the Australian University Teacher of the Year award and be promoted to full professor at the Australia National University.