New Zealand Music in the Popular Imagination 1988-2010: Revisiting a Moment for ‘Our Music’.

Abstract

From the late 1980s until around 2010 a new type of national conversation arose around music created in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. This conversation was played out in popular literature, public forums, academic research and ultimately in government policy outputs. This period of energy and enthusiasm for claiming a unique musical heritage and in developing the cultural, social and economic potential of this music was brief, but notable. Looking back, we can clean interesting insights into a period of real enthusiasm for New Zealand music as an important signifier of what it meant to be ‘from New Zealand’ through books about New Zealand music aimed at mainstream audiences. This interest in discussing New Zealand music in new ways was also reflected in the academy, with attempts to deconstruct the popularity of New Zealand music and government involvement in it being published around the same time. This article is by no means an exhaustive history of this period in New Zealand music literature, but a review of key books and the common themes that strung them together in what represents not a canon, but a moment in New Zealand music that captured the popular imagination and was celebrated in print as well as discussed in broader academic forums too. This moment can be critiqued as gendered – dominated by male writers and therefore male perspectives, but that is not the purpose of this article. This flurry of publishing is cast here as a reaction to popular culture that was very much of its time and the wider contexts of New Zealand’s socio-political culture during that period. It is argued that ultimately, this rash of books about New Zealand music reflected an energy around trying to connect New Zealand music to the wider work of identifying and celebrating a maturing and definitive understanding of what it meant to be from New Zealand. This fed a wider interest in New Zealand music as significant inside the academy and
also within government agencies charged with supporting cultural work.