The reason Jack Tame kept saying 'to the waaaall' during the TVNZ leaders' debate

The origins of the surprise catchphrase from the first leaders' debate, revealed.

It’s not often that you can draw a Venn diagram comprising New Zealand politics and American rappers and find a satisfyingly chunky overlap, but last night Jack Tame delivered. 

Those watching TVNZ’s leaders' debate and only in possession of rudimentary early-2000s hip hop knowledge may have thought that nice Jack was simply very fond of his vowels, as he intermittently asked the audience to shift their focus from the Chrises to the data behind them on “the waaaall”. 

A Spinoff investigation can now clear Tame of any bias in the ongoing vowel vs consonant debate, and reveal the debate moderator’s elongated "a" was a nod to a track by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz.

‘Get Low’, feat. the Ying Yang Twins, was released in 2002 on the album Kings of Crunk, and includes the lyric: “To the window, to the wall”. How does Lil Jon deliver “the wall”? “The waaaall”, of course.

Caution: contains unparliamentary language

It’s safe to conclude then that in the hip hop version of last night's leaders' debate, Tame cast himself in the role of Lil Jon. But where does that leave Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins? Let’s consider the options.

Luxon is the MP for Botany, in the east of Auckland, which suggests he could well be The East Side Boy. He would, however, need to earn the Z on the end by assembling a posse.

Let’s assume he only wants to share the mic with senior cabinet ministers. The obvious move would be for him to hit up Simeon Brown, who holds the east Auckland seat of Pakuranga, and Erica Stanford, who is the MP for East Coast Bays (which will forthwith be referred to as East Coast Bayz). 

The challenge for Luxon would be selling the word “boyz” to Stanford, but if he could pull it off, he’d leave Hipkins struggling for relevancy. Hipkins’ Remutaka electorate sits at the south of the North Island, and is a little west of centre. That positioning gives Hipkins no realistic chance of selling himself as an East Side Boy. If the roles of Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz are taken, Hipkins is left scrambling. 

But, if Luxon failed to sell “boyz” to Stanford, the whole makeup of the night shifts. At that point, any reasonable voter would forget the East Coast Boyz and start thinking Chris and Chris are looking a lot like the Ying Yang Twins.

That’s a difficult territory for both Chrises. Do they want voters thinking they are much of a muchness? Do they want them struggling to figure out how one Chris offers anything different to the other Chris? 

As hip hop emerges as a key issue in this election, the National Party may well be struggling with bad memories. The last time the party found itself on a venn diagram with a US rapper was during the 2014 election. National used a track that sounded an awful lot like Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ in a campaign advertisement. A long, and thoroughly entertaining, court case ensued, going all the way to the court of appeal, where a judge ordered the National party to pay $225,000 to the rapper’s publisher, Eight Mile. 

But if hip hop's late entrance as a hot button issue last night posed challenges for the politicians, how did it go down with voters? The Spinoff has spoken to numerous members of the debate audience who all expressed relief that Tame had chosen to pull out “the waaall” line from ‘Get Low’. They said a line from the song that more obviously nodded to the political spectrum may have caused terrible scenes if Tame had directed it at Luxon and Hipkins: “Pop that ass, to the left and the right”.