The Opinionated Diner

I feel decidedly queasy today but I guess its my own fault. The annual New Zealand Music Awards (for some odd reason, called the Tuis) are an excuse for the industry to drink too much, pat themselves on the back, listen to some music, and talk absolute, inebriated nonsense until dawn. As a cynic by nature, and having been to 20 odd (and odd they have been from time to time) of these things I've taken to leaving earylish in recent years. Last night was different. Actually I left my grumpy old cynic hat at home and had quite a time. The awards themselves are just the awards...a new "big" act hailed and feted each year and usually forgotten the next... Can't help feeling that the act of the year in 2004, Scribe, is heading in the same direction. While he's phenomenal live (and completely demolished every other act on the night), his album, doesn't show the sort of depth that its gonna take to jump beyond his current fanbase of early teen kids...fans who move on fairly fast. I really like the guy and he has charisma but it takes a little musical substance too.....I'd love to be proved wrong. Talking of one trick ponies (guess I just found my cynic's hat), I can't help feeling that the Dawn Raid hip hop posse may well have peaked too. There is only so far you can go sounding like Boo Yaa demos from 1990 and I ain't heard much else. Fuck it, I might as well carry on now.....the other two hip hop "contenders" up there at the moment make me laugh. No, seriously they do. The Fast Crew and Misfits of Science look to my eyes like the the sort of hip hop parody a show like Saturday Night Live might throw together. How on earth did we get to this..... Of the current crop of Kiwi hip-hoppers (and I say current because NZ hip hop is hardly new ...3 The Hard Way sold 35,000 copies of "Hip Hop Holiday" in 95 and Scribe hasn't come within a mile of that) I kinda like Dei Hamo. I knew him well in an earlier guise when we called him Sonny and he had a song called "Stop Tagging", a hit in the early nineties. He's a cool guy with a good attitude and the current number one. "We Gon Ride" might have an embarrassingly parochial video, the sort that condemns us to be a backwater at the bottom of the world, but its a nice song and Sonny pulls it off. Guess I'm in trouble now...... But the real fun at the awards is the aftershow swirl. I don't know if many of the drunken deals come to much but I made a couple of contacts and expressed myself incoherently to quite a few. My head hurts.....