Tumgik
#pauly fuemana
retropopcult · 1 year
Video
youtube
"How Bizarre" is a song written and performed by New Zealand musical group OMC. It was released in December 1995 as the lead single from their album of the same name and went on to top the charts of five countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.  In the US, it peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart in April of 1996.
52 notes · View notes
countriesgame · 2 months
Text
Please reblog for a bigger sample size!
If you have any fun fact about Niue, please tell us and I'll reblog it!
Be respectful in your comments. You can criticize a government without offending its people.
14 notes · View notes
gothwizardmagic · 2 years
Video
youtube
Kia ora!  It’s day 20 of Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa, and it’s time for today’s song rec!
This is another kiwi classic that’s blown up on Tiktok in the last few years, but it was originally released in 1995 by pop-rap group OMC (short for Ōtara Millionaire’s Club - a tongue in cheek reference to Ōtara’s status as one of Auckland’s poorest suburbs.) The original Ōtara Millionaire’s Club was formed by brothers Phil and Pauly Fuemana in 1992, and after the pair split Pauly Fuemana approached a well known producer to continue the group under the shortened name OMC.  How Bizarre was an immediate success when released in 1995, and to this day is vaunted as one of the best one-hit-wonders of all time.  The band split up over a disagreement about royalties, and tragically both Fuemana brothers have since passed away.
You’ll like them if you like: Salt-N-Pepa, Snoop Dogg, Warren G
Similar NZ Artists: Dragon - Pop Rock Split Enz - Art Rock
22 notes · View notes
my-chaos-radio · 11 months
Text
youtube
Tumblr media
Release: December 15, 1995
Lyrics:
Brother Pele's in the back, sweet Zina's in the front
Cruisin' down the freeway in the hot, hot sun
Suddenly red-blue lights flash us from behind
Loud voice booming, "Please step out onto the line"
Pele preaches words of comfort, Zina just hides her eyes
Policeman taps his shades, "Is that a Chevy '69?"
How bizarre
How bizarre, how bizarre
Destination unknown, as we pull in for some gas
A freshly pasted poster reveals a smile from the past
Elephants and acrobats, lions, snakes, monkey
Pele speaks "righteous, " Sister Zina says "funky"
How bizarre
How bizarre, how bizarre
Ooh, baby (ooh, baby)
It's making me crazy (It's making me crazy)
Everytime I look around (look around)
Everytime I look around (everytime I look around)
Everytime I look around
It's in my face
Ring master steps out and says "the elephants left town"
People jump and jive, but the clowns have stuck around
TV news and camera, there's choppers in the sky
Marines, police, reporters ask where, for and why
Pele yells: "We're outta here", Zina says: "Right on"
Making moves and starting grooves before they knew we were gone
Jumped into the Chevy and headed for big lights
Wanna know the rest? Hey, buy the rights
How bizarre
How bizarre, how bizarre
Ooh, baby (ooh, baby)
It's making me crazy (It's making me crazy)
Everytime I look around (look around)
Everytime I look around (everytime I look around)
Everytime I look around
It's in my face
It's in my face
Ooh, baby (ooh, baby)
It's making me crazy (It's making me crazy)
Everytime I look around (look around)
Everytime I look around (everytime I look around)
Everytime I look around
It's in my face
Ooh, baby (ooh, baby)
It's making me crazy (It's making me crazy)
Everytime I look around (look around)
Everytime I look around (look around)
Everytime I look around
It's in my face
Songwriter:
Pauly Fuemana / Alan Jansson
SongFacts:
"How Bizarre" is a song written and performed by New Zealand musical group OMC. It was released in December 1995 as the lead single from their only album of the same name and went on to top the charts of five countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand. Outside New Zealand, OMC is generally considered a one-hit wonder; they had a further few successful singles in New Zealand, including "On the Run" and "Land of Plenty".
"How Bizarre" topped the singles charts in New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Canada and Ireland. As the track was only released to radio in the United States, with no commercial single made available to buy, the song was not allowed to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 under the chart rules in place at the time. However, it topped the Mainstream Top 40 for a week, then called the Pop Singles. It also peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart. The single was number one for one week in Canada, two weeks in Austria,[8] three weeks in Ireland, three weeks in New Zealand[10] and five weeks in Australia. On 9 February 2010, the song re-entered the New Zealand charts at number 40 after Fuemana's death.
The song won the award for "Single of the Year" at the 1996 New Zealand Music Awards. It was also featured on Nature's Best 2, as the 34th greatest New Zealand song of all time as voted for by members of the Australasian Performing Right Association in 2001. In 2002, the song was named as the 71st greatest one-hit wonder of all time on a VH1 countdown hosted by William Shatner.
2 notes · View notes
qudachuk · 1 year
Link
In 1996, singer Pauly Fuemana and producer Alan Jansson wrote a smash hit that came to define the decade and changed New Zealand’s music industry forever. Those who were there recall how it happenedTwenty-seven years ago this April, a...
0 notes
yeltsinsstar · 3 years
Link
0 notes
Photo
Tumblr media
Pauly Fuemana.
0 notes
loveboatinsanity · 7 years
Photo
Tumblr media
5 notes · View notes
flow-it-show-it · 5 years
Text
Tumblr media
Multiple times over the past week, I'd be in a store and hear OMC's "How Bizarre" on the in-store mix. I told my spouse; he thought it was random coincidence. We ran errands together today, walked into a shop we hadn't visited in months, and coming over the PA... well, it's like the song says: Ooh baby, it's making me crazy. Every time I look around, it's in my face.
18 notes · View notes
accidentalajumma · 3 years
Text
Seoul is a massive city. It has a population of 10 million. Once you take into account all the satellite cities in the capital area, from which many people commute daily into Seoul, that’s 25 million people. And yet, I feel like my life proceeds along village level lines sometimes. I only ever visit a few areas, and my life is further circumscribed by the fact that I am a foreigner and my friends are mostly foreigners but even so. 
One way or another, it feels like a very small town sometimes.
Example 1: The foreign guy at the CU. CU is a convenience store. It has literally thousands of stores in Seoul - there are 4 within 5 minutes’ walk of my apartment. There is a foreign guy who I see very regularly sitting outside the CU that is actually in my apartment block, enjoying a drink and reading his paper. I see the very same foreign guy very regularly sitting outside the CU that is in the same building as the studio where all my singing activities (such as they are right now) happen. Enjoying a drink and reading his paper there too. I don’t mean he is following me. I don’t think he even knows I exist. He is just doing his thing. From someone I know, I have been told who he is and where he works. I guess the CUs that have seats outside are a bit more limited, and perhaps the one outside my apartment is close-ish to his place of work. Still. 
Example 2: Apartments in Hannam-dong that I have visited. Hannam-dong is a posh area of Seoul. This makes the Ajeosshi laugh - he went to university there when at least parts of it were very much less posh. Anyway, it has long been an ‘international’ area, with plenty of embassies, and is fully posh now - BTS live there. It has more than 20,000 residents. I have visited five people’s apartments there. Two times, the apartments turned out to be in the same building, neither of which had more than about 8 or 10 apartments in it. Once, it turned out to be the very SAME APARTMENT, rented by different people (who don’t know each other) at different times. 5 people’s homes. 3 buildings. 4 different apartments. As OMC said, How Bizarre. (Also, in looking for that link I discovered that OMC’s lead singer Pauly Fuemana died of a rare disease in 2010 at the age of 40. How very sad.)
Example 3: When we first moved here, we lived in a serviced apartment for the first month. I knew nothing about the city and picked rather randomly on price, and a basic centrality, not necessarily thinking we would actually end up living anywhere near there. We then looked for a place to live. And repeated the process a year later. We looked in LOTS of different areas both times. All three apartments we ended up living in have been within 5 minutes’ walk of each other. 
Example 4: Through my singing activities (which don’t happen anywhere near where I live), I have met 3 different people (one local, two foreign) who live either in the building I used to live in, or in buildings right next to where I currently live. I can’t begin to describe the number of buildings in this city. I don’t know that many people....
8 notes · View notes
omgthatdress · 4 years
Video
youtube
A few weeks ago, I found myself being followed by the song “How Bizarre.” It was first a hit when I was a kid, and I actually have memories of a Tampa in 1996-specific parody version playing on the radio. I knew that in spite of it being one of the biggest hits of the 90s, the band behind it was considered a one-hit wonder. I assumed it would be another nondescript pop act with just one good song, but when I looked into it, I found something way more interesting. (Come and follow me down the hyperfixation rabbit hole....)
The band, OMC hails from New Zealand and was fronted by Pauly Fuemana, who was of Maori and Nieuan descent. OMC stands for “Otara Millionaires Club.” Otara is a working-class neighborhood in Auckland that’s primarily populated by PoC. It’s sort of the New Zealand version of Compton. In the videos the band made, Fuemana stands out both with his unique fashion choices and his easy pop star charisma. Working with songwriter Simon Grigg, OMC made pop music with catchy and clear Polynesian influence. And the whole album fucking slaps. Like seriously it’s so good. For as iconically 90s as “How Bizarre” is, it fits right in on an album that sounds like it could not only come out today but also be a big hit. OMC unjustly went down in history as one-hit wonders due to mismanagement by their record label and Fuemana’s own self-destructive tendencies. Ultimately, OMC was way before its time. I feel like if they’d have come out in a day and age when it’s easier for musicians to directly promote their music and connect with new fans, they’d have been way more successful.
Anyway, why is this on OMGTD? The Polynesian parts of their music really intrigued me, as I knew very little about Polynesian music. But it turns out I’d heard much of it before, only I’d heard it under the label of “surfer music.” OMC definitely isn’t what I’d call surfer music, even though the twangy guitars are familiar. It turns out Westerners have much more exposure to Polynesian culture and art than we’re often aware of, it just gets appropriated and sold as “tiki” or “surfer” culture.
So it sent me down another rabbit hole, exploring “Hawaiian” fashion and how it all fits in to Western culture. 
121 notes · View notes
retropopcult · 3 years
Video
youtube
"How Bizarre" is a song by New Zealand musical group OMC. It was released in late 1995 as the lead single from their only album  and went on to top the charts of at least five countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.  It hit #4 in the US on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 22, 1996.
Music & Media wrote about the song: "Polynesian pop with a twist. Pauly Fuemana has a gravelly, deep voice and a major rap attitude. The Spanish guitar, trumpet and the sweet female background vocals create a radio friendly mood.”
75 notes · View notes
getaroomyouheck · 5 years
Note
Man, the person who started that whole Lady thing is from New Zealand. *My* country. So disgraceful. What would Temuera Morrison think? What would Pauly Fuemana think?
vro that person who switched out their brain for a chunk of crayons is from your goddamn country? jeez thats gonna be a hard fuckup for you new zealand boys to make up for lmao
just went on twitter, saw this person say “oh lady looks ugly” then subsequently posting their edit, which looked like the fucking dancing chrome alien meme, and realized that they were no one worth discussing or ever interacting with. blocked em immediately after that haha
8 notes · View notes
olafsings · 2 years
Text
youtube
Music History Today: December 15, 2021
December 15, 1995: The single "How Bizarre" by OMC was released. Lead singer Pauly Fuemana was a gang member in Auckland, New Zealand before achieving pop immortality with this song. He received his musical training in a New Zealand juvenile prison. OMC stands for Otara Millionaires Club, after the neighborhood in Auckland where Fuemana grew up. It's a somewhat fanciful name, as the Auckland suburb of Otara is a ghetto/slum.
Read more: https://www.olafsings.com/2021/12/music-history-today-december-15-2021.html
0 notes
mammamiaculpa · 3 years
Text
Zombie Culture
‘How Bizarre’ is a long dead one hit wonder by a long dead band by a long dead Kiwi. Its speak-sung-rapped stylings remind the listener of a shit Happy Mondays tribute act that got too big for its boots and decided to go off about systemic racism in New Zealand against Polynesians. Not that its purpose is insincere, and nor should one neglect the history of dawn raids by Auckland police - it is just a bad song. And yet, like a zombie, it has been resuscitated by the great Frankenstein of mass culture, that being TikTok. Mark Fisher believed that the twenty-first century was condemned to experience mass culture as but the ghost of the old, but far from the ‘postmodern retro’ of the deliberately evocative artists he cites (Arctic Monkeys, Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson), TikTok is oftentimes not merely a repetition but a direct resuscitation of the old. Janus-faced with an era in which many musical stylings deliberately lower their fidelity in order to achieve a simulacrum of analogue sound, TikTok drags the old back from the depths and gives them a digital reworking, a high-gloss finish, and a dance trend to boot!
What I personally find most bizarre about the second/after/life of ‘How Bizarre,’ and hence I opened with its context, is its dislocation from its artistic intent. In fact, one of TikTok’s greatest feats is its success as a dislocation machine, severing cultural instances from their musical, cinematic, or televisual contexts, making them ‘audios,’ and repeating them ad nauseum in a simulacrum of a zeitgeist. The words ‘how bizarre’ float disembodied through the void, bifurcated from 1996, OMC’s dead Kiwi, Pauly Fuemana, divorced from the racist cop profiling him for owning a nice car. Fisher described haunting as ‘failed mourning,’ that which refuses to settle for capitalist realism and thus will always come back, but Pauly lacks the pertinacity of a spectre; though he is ‘pure virtuality,’ an incorporeality, he lacks agency. If ghosts are defined as incorporeal beings that have agency over the world of the living, the resuscitation of ‘How Bizarre’ and countless other artefacts of Old World pop is more akin to zombie culture: that which acts upon the world but is without agency, being instead manipulated by the tides of mass industry - the currents of TikTok and the circadian rhythms of its Gen Z hivemind.
I cannot say whether this is bad or not. Sampling, and that is fundamentally what this is, has long existed, and though it is usually a simple transplant - from one song’s body to another - there are samples that echo into a thousand permutations, most famously the Funky Drummer break by Clyde Stubblefield. Importantly however, though both are revenants, ghosts are emphatic, didactic, while zombies are bereft of agency, purposeless but for being and spreading, like the dead labour of surplus value Marx describes in Capital. We children of the post-9/11 malaise are not fit to be ghosts, but zombies, doomed to mindless recitation and endless resuscitation; the best artefacts and greatest minds mere reanimations, simulacra of vitality from an era in which mass culture seemed to enjoy a cause and effect between effort and change. I am not saying it is all totally without merit however, I refuse to be cast as the old man yelling at clouds. Like all artefacts of mass culture, TikTok represents variety in its repertoire - Never before could K-Pop stans have crashed a Trump rally’s ticketing system. I simply wish to explicate how bizarre it all is. If anything, the zombification of mass culture is appropriate for an era defined by catastrophic slow death - social, economic, environmental, even temporal, as we of Gen Z are continually haunted by the lost futures promised to us. Though I can’t lie, no apocalypse should be soundtracked by Pauly Fuemana.
Up Yours Magazine, issue 3, March 2021
0 notes
ljaesch · 3 years
Video
youtube
"How Bizarre" was released as a single from OMC's album, How Bizarre, which was released in the United States in 1997. Unfortunately, the single didn't receive a commercial release in the United States, which made it ineligible to appear on the Billboard Hot 100 due to the chart rules that were in effect at the time. However, the song did peak at number one on Billboard's Mainstream Top 40 chart. Unfortunately, two of the members of OMC have passed away since this song's popularity: vocalist Pauly Fuemana passed away in 2010, and his brother Phil Fuemana passed away in 2005.
I was around 21-22 years old when "How Bizarre" was released as a single in the United States. I liked this song when I heard it, because it sounded different from other songs being released to pop radio at the time. This was one of those cases where sounding different helped the song.
The music video sees some footage of the group driving around in a1968 Chevrolet Impala while lip-syncing the song, and other shots have the group in a room surrounded by dancers, and some shots of someone breathing fire. Unfortunately, you can tell there wasn't much of a budget for this video, especially with the shots where it's obvious Pauly is standing in front of a green screen as sped up footage plays behind him. It's kind of a bizarre video, but that seems to be appropriate for a song titled, "How Bizarre."
0 notes