Espresso this, Not Like Us that. There will be only one true song of Aotearoa’s summer: Harty Māori Stylez by Te Kura Reo Rua o Waikirikiri.
This summer, as you cruise coast to coast, you’re going to need an anthem to soundtrack your movements. A song that encapsulates the feeling of sunshine and hot days in about three minutes or less, and when you’re not playing it through the speakers at home, it follows you via the radio, so prolific and synonymous with the summer that it represents the whole season for the entire time you’re living it – in short, the song of the summer.
A summer anthem – a societally agreed upon song of the summer – is one that should exude everything you love about the season: going to the beach, taking it easy, warmth from the sunrays and some mindless optimism. Usually it’s the song you hear on every radio station when you’re turning the dials to hear something else. Or, in the viral words of rapper Saweetie, it’s “something fun, something for the summer time, something for the girls to get ready and party to”.
Even though our summers are six months apart, hits from the US and UK tend to dominate our charts for the majority of the year, and our summer anthem conversations. Thankfully, there is a New Zealand song that embodies all of these energies but has yet to reach chart success, or any chart at all.
‘Harty Māori Stylez’ from the Waikirikiri Swag EP by Gisborne’s Waikirikiri School (now Te Kura Reo Rua o Waikirikiri) is the musical equivalent of the East Coast wave: cool, carefree and cedelessly chill.
The EP contains “all the YouTube hits”, according to Bandcamp: ‘Waikirikiri Swag’, ‘Delicate’, ‘Harty Māori Stylez’ and ‘Turanganui-a-Kiwa’ – all written, recorded and produced by “Matua Rob”. They’re all great tracks, but the obvious standout is ‘Harty Māori Stylez’, performed by Hiria, Kamaia, Torence, Weighn and Te Ratu (all the performers are credited by first name only, like Beyonce and Madonna).
The track kicks off with a very simple piano melody, going ba dum, ba dum, ba dum. Seventeen seconds in, Hiria is the first voice to emerge on the track: “I’m the baddest chick in the whole wide school, and I love my kapa hakas, yeah I got mad skills”.
Let’s pause there: other than the obvious (Hiria having potential to be New Zealand’s answer to Megan Thee Stallion), these lyrics may be the strongest opening words to a song ever sung (or rapped?) in Aotearoa. Hiria is setting the scene here: she’s the school’s baddest chick (insane braggadocio tactics), she loves kapa haka (plural) and she’s got mad skills, which are soon revealed to be “like Maisey Rika” (obviously Rika gets a shout out as a Bay of Plenty native).
Then, there’s the chorus:
Cruising with the whānau to get me a kai
Cruising with the girls and I’m full of delight
I represent that harty Māori Style
“To get me a kai” rather than “to get a kai” symbolises the carefree attitude of the East Coast. It embodies a real chill vibe that is at once poetic yet flippant, the mark of an educated decision to cater a sentence, no matter the rules of grammar, to truly touch your audience – much like Sabrina Carpenter singing “that’s that me, espresso”. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense per se, but the vibe is understood and the ability to condense such a strong feeling in four short words is an art in itself. Anyway, let’s move on.
Though there is lyrical genius sprinkled throughout ‘Harty Māori Stylez’, the second verse is arguably the best thanks to the natural flow of Torence, and some adlibs which we’ll assume are the stylings of Matua Rob:
Me and the bros on the way to the hāngī pit, gonna get a massive feed of fish and chips
Pork bones, boil up, puha and watercress, these are the types of gifts I want for Christmas
Kumara? Yeah!
Fry bread? Yeah!
$20 kinas from the dairy? Oh heck yeah!
Feeling so fly with my Big Ben’s pie, gotta go now, see ya, bye!
Who among us can honestly say they wouldn’t like a massive feed of fish and chips (ignoring the part where you’re going to a hāngī pit to get it) during the summer time? Pork bones, boil up, puha and watercress being on a child’s Christmas wishlist is perhaps the most honestly Kiwiana summer thing you could come up with. $20 kinas from the diary? Oh heck yeah.
There’s something that happens at the end of this verse, after Te Ratu and Weighn call “Waikirikiri e ngunguru nei, hi au, au, aue” and instead of a “hah!”, there’s a janky cut in where they call “swag!” instead. For the sake of this article, we’ll just ignore that.
You may read this and think, “this chick is buzzing out about a song some primary school kids made”. But ‘Harty Māori Stylez’ is much deeper than that – it’s an affirmation, a manifestation to speak into existence. I have found myself mindlessly humming the melody as white noise. I’m making plans to get me a kai over the summer. I can’t stop saying “got the mad skills like Maisey Rika”.
So, who will ensure ‘Harty Māori Stylez’ is heard and felt by all New Zealand? So far only the 95bFM Jukebox Parlour host Jenn Tamati (and one other person) has purchased the EP on bandcamp. So I can only assume ‘Harty Māori Stylez’ will soon be a staple on the student radio airwaves. Will The Edge recognise its chart potential and decide to play it four times in the same hour? Will it get a spin on Mai FM after an It’s Cool to Kōrero segment? Will The Breeze keep its listeners on the coast tuned into the summer’s ultimate easy listening banger?
And where are the talents of Waikirikiri Swag EP hiding today, you ask? We may never know, as Te Kura Reo Rua o Waikirikiri never responded to my message seeking these musical geniuses and there’s probably at least 50 “Matua Rob”s in the Bay of Plenty alone. Perhaps they were worried that exposing the world to ‘Harty Māori Stylez’ would shame out all the other Māori musicians because there’s no way they could recreate genius like this. They should definitely get Maisey Rika on the remix though.