The hit squad
3 July 1999, NZ Herald, by Russell Baillie
Talking to Phil Fuemana and some of the acts on his Urban Pacifika Records - the Otara-born label which just keeps hoisting hits high into the charts - you soon hear a pattern developing. It's a smart line in the "yes, but ... variety.
Yes, the label's roots might be there, says Fuemana, but UPR shouldn't be thought of as just a South Auckland label.
Yes, the acts have ties to various Pacific island cultures but their music reflects the life and rhythms of the world's biggest Polynesian city.
Yes, the UPR sound is derived from the slick and image-conscious American pop idioms of r'n'b and hip-hop, but it's still about the groups doing them in their own style and accents.
They do that in force on the label's debut album, the compilation Pioneers of a Pacifikan Frontier.
And yes, Pioneers is impressive, collecting those hit singles, giving UPR's four acts a launching platform while still sounding like a cohesive, bass-thumpingly good filler-free funky pop album ... but?
Well, you just wait for the acts' individual albums already in the making, the engaging Fuemana reiterates as he talks, laptop at his elbow in the Auckland city boardroom of BMG records.
The major signed UPR - as a street-savvy research and development arm, effectively - after he formed the label in 1996.
When he's not in the studio playing exacting producer, he's the groups' cellphone-toting manager too, operating out of an office in his house.
The older brother of Pauly of OMC fame, Fuemana's has long been active in Otara as a musician and producer, first coming to prominence during the time of the attention-getting 1994 South Auckland compilation Proud, a natural ancestor to Pioneers.
"Personally this album is the real Proud, the no-strings-attached Proud." Present to talk too - but respectfully quiet - are two voices from the opposite ends of the UPR spectrum. There's Rita Tuiala, of the four-piece girl group Moizna, who started up while still at school in Avondale.The quartet has already had early success with two "most promising" music awards after singles Just Another Day and Keep on Moving.
The hip-hop squad representative is Kendall "KD" Takai, of the quintet Losttribe, who came to attention with tracks like the hit Summer in the Winter and 5 B.U.N.G.A.
The rest of the roster is solo rapper Dei Hamo and the aforementioned male r'n'b duo. aka Brown - whose latest single, Something I Need, is No 6 in the charts - who feature with guest Dave Dobbyn on Pioneers on a harmony-soaked version of his Beside You. There's also been label "supergroup" Urban Pacifika which delivered last year's hit One, a neat sampling of the hook from Split Enz's One Step Ahead over a crisp pop groove.
That track was all part of trying to sound like the songs come from here, Fuemana says, not from the islands or the United States.
"As a label we just present in the music how we feel. Losttribe write about things that have affected them and their parents [Moizna] might write love songs about Island guys and not American guys. The label has a Polynesian focus because that is who we are.
"But we reflect the city-born. People try to label us an Island thing but we are urbanites, man, we go to Ponsonby and drink coffee like everyone else. We just have a heritage that we address through some of our songs. Like the album title says Pioneers of a Pacifikan Frontier - we are the new lot.
"We've stopped apologising for liking hip-hop and r'n'b and tried to say we don't want to be Americans. Hell no, we love this music and we are going to do it and do it the best we can. That is what we really stand for."
That united front, UPR's production and writing methods as well as Fuemana's degree of control might remind of the heyday of Motown.
Funnily enough, says Fuemana, he talked to Motown executive Frank Wilson on his visit here some years back and when he complained to the American that there wasn't local industry support for brown-faced pop, Wilson advised a DIY approach.
"He just said to me, 'Phil, start your own thing. Start your own music label, your own music awards, your own magazine. They will come to you.
"Yeah true. We've just done our own thing and everyone has come to us."
He admits that the united front is sometimes, well, a front: "While UPR is an umbrella, they are their own groups. They have got to get their own shit together, rehearse hardcore and hit that stage when they are told to. I will get us to the stage, but you have still got to do the job. I will get the studio time, but they still have to do their stuff.
"It's not like dragging four TrueBliss around. We have our struggles as a family. We don't like some stuff. We will argue about some stuff. We will split apart, but because of that we have grown strong and now when we do projects we respect each other's point of view."
Talking of projects, why lead off album-wise with a compilation? Isn't there a risk, especially after the success of One, in having the UPR brand mistaken as a band?
Fuemana says they're a good first step both for the acts and with the early part of their relationship with BMG. It's also a chance to show off the their early production and song-writing skills.
"Because a lot of compilations that come out are pretty bad, especially in our genre - Polynesian/ pop/ r'n'b. I've been involved in some bad ones and some awesome ones and we wanted ours to be up there, to be accessible, and to still be us. In the past we've done okay records but they haven't been us.
"We still haven't really managed to break the groups away and that is our next challenge after this.With Moizna's album being worked on now hopefully we get smaller as they get bigger."
But the label is in it for the long haul, he says. "To me, Urban Pacifika has a longer life than maybe some of the groups. I want to continue to diversify. I want to do a movie - that is my dream as a label to do film and other things other than music.
"Music is our strength at the moment, but who knows which groups it will be who brings in the money or really goes off? It could be any of these four and then next year we go looking for other groups. This is not an overnight thing, there is no Plan B, this is the career move.
"All we need is to get one of these groups overseas for someone besides us to hear them. I just want some other ears to hear how good we are."
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