Waiata 100: What do New Zealand's favourite songs say about us?

Some of my favourite songs were never hits, yet they live on in my personal playlists like well-kept secrets. But when thousands of New Zealanders agree on a song, what does it tell us about ourselves as a community?

Close to 10,000 listeners voted. That’s a lot more than you get in standard political polls.

Kara Rickard previews the Waiata 100 final countdown

Morning Report

And number one was ‘Poi E’, Dalvanius Prime and the Patea Māori Club’s groundbreaking fusion of kapa haka and breakdance funk.

Not only was ‘Poi E’ the clear favourite, but digging into the analytics reveals that it led the vote in every region but one. Only Gisborne put up an alternative: Herbs’ ‘Sensitive To A Smile’, no doubt a reflection of the group’s healing visit to the region in 1987 following a spate of community-rending arsons.

Released independently with almost no support from radio, ‘Poi E’ first became a hit in early 1984 and stayed on the charts for almost half of that year. Local number ones were enough of a rarity; one sung entirely in te reo was almost unheard of.

And it’s never gone away. In 2010, it had a massive reboot as the 'Thriller'-style finale of Taika Waititi’s film Boy. In 2016, it had its own documentary, Poi E: The Story of Our Song.

The top rating given to ‘Poi E’ might say something about the Kiwi battler syndrome: the pride we take in our victories over unlikely odds. More emphatically, it makes a statement about how much we value te reo and recognise the vital role Māori culture has played in the music of this country.

In fact, half the songs in the Waiata Top 10 are either written or sung by Māori artists. Three have been recorded in te reo. Looking further down the 100, you’ll find ‘Pokarekare Ana’ which dates from the First World War, and ‘Tutira Mai Nga Iwi’, which Canon Wi Huata wrote after World War II.

This recognition seems to have grown in recent years. The last time a major survey of New Zealand’s best songs was undertaken, APRA’s ‘Top 100 New Zealand Songs Of All Time’ in 2001,’ Poi E’ came in 37th.

Only APRA members – in other words, songwriters – were invited to vote in that poll. Still, its effects were wide-reaching. It created the massively selling Nature’s Best compilation CDs. For the first time, New Zealanders were presented with a canon of their own pop music. These songs, the compilations seemed to say, are us.

The lingering influence of Nature’s Best hangs over the Waiata 100. Of the top ten songs, half appeared on the first Nature’s Best album, and only two – Fat Freddy’s Drop’s ‘Wandering Eye’ and Dave Dobbyn’s ‘Welcome Home’ – did not feature on any of the subsequent volumes, for the obvious reason that they weren’t released yet. Both came out in 2005.

It’s hard to escape the thought that the ubiquity of those collections has hardwired their contents into our self-image. Does repeatedly being told that these are our iconic national songs mean we reflexively vote for them on sight?

Digging into the demographics, almost a quarter of the Waiata 100 voters were in the 45-54 age bracket, and nearly as many in the 55-64 range. 17.1 percent were 65+. No surprises there as this is the core RNZ audience.

Yet encouragingly, they weren’t the only ones voting. Exactly a third of the votes came from the under-44s, with almost half of those being between the ages of 18 and 34. And there was even a smattering of votes from under-18s.

We can see that under-25s voted strongly for songs by twenty-somethings Lorde and Benee, though it wasn’t enough to put either into the final Top 10. More surprisingly, this demographic showed as much enthusiasm as any other for such Nature’s Best perennials as Th’ Dudes, Crowded House and the Exponents.

Yet overall, rock bands are less dominant than they were on Nature’s Best. Feelers, Zed and Stellar have all dropped out of the 100. Though nu-metallers Blindspott were acknowledged with two songs in the Waiata 100, so were the Topp Twins, whose strength as songwriters was for too long overshadowed by their brilliance as entertainers.

In the 2001 APRA poll, only one of the top 10 songs was written by a woman, Bic Runga’s ‘Sway’. Sadly, that remains the case. It doesn’t reflect the way that women - from Elizabeth Stokes and Aldous Harding to Benee and Tami Neilson – are currently making some of the most vital music to come out of this country, a fact that has been better recognised by audiences overseas.

It would be facile to look at the Waiata 100 and say simply: this is us.

It says to me that songs, like ideas, take time to embed themselves in our culture. It is only in hindsight that we recognise them for the taonga they are.

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