The spat106 short longform #6

Mumble the NZ national anthem’s Māori verse while doing a drunken haka overseas

During the 90s, as is the theme in my previous newsletter, the national anthem was only sung in English before sports events and during my experience at intermediate school we sung the national anthem in both Māori and English. We were well versed in it.

The anthem being sung only in the language of Queen Elizabeth II and David Beckham changed in 1999. Before the start of the All Blacks vs England World Cup test match at Twickenham, Hinewehi Mohi sung the national anthem in only Te Reo, the New Zealand public was astounded because it had only ever been publicly sung in English before the commencement of the sporting fixture.

This was no issue to anyone under 20 as we had rehearsed it many times in the Māori language but adults at that time didn’t know the Māori verse.
Every sporting event from then on included both the Māori and English, not only to show the diverse cultures of New Zealand but also to compete with South Africa for the world’s longest national anthem. South Africa’s national anthem has verses in both English and Afrikaans, Afrikaans is also known to many as Redneck Dutch.

So a lot of people because of that were in the midst of a culture shock, they were to used to their ways of only knowing the English verse of God Defend New Zealand. The question was then how would they still feel like they could contribute during the Māori part without knowing the words? Easy. Mumble it. Then that way they are putting as much effort into singing the first verse correctly as they are in pronouncing the h in Whangarei, Whanganui and Mangawhai.

It seems to be acceptable for some of these people to mumble the national anthem, however if I did the same by mumbling a line from Shakespeare or a line from their favourite sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys, there would be hell to pay, for me at least.

There is an obvious conflict however. Those people who mumble that Māori verse are then almost certainly the same people being seen overseas performing a drunken haka. A drunken haka is the mumbling of hakas. It’s also always the Ka Mate haka too, although I don’t blame them. I watched the Kapo o Pango for a decade and have yet to memorise it correctly. .And god knows what’s going on with the Kiwi rugby league team’s haka.

There’s other examples of people having their cake and eating it too (good idiom, greato successo). Much discussion took place about a person who is seen as both a rugby legend and heathen, Sonny Bill Williams . He taped over the BNZ logo on his jersey. Initially I thought it may have been to make me proud because I am ASB for life but it wasn’t. Because his faith is against interest payments he covered up the logos. Then some people were outraged by this, forgetting that they’re the same people who cry about paying interest on their mortgage. And who really is a massive fan of banks anyway?

SBW then got to replace the BNZ logo with Plunket which you’d think would appease everyone but people will still hold vigils for the poor banks that got screwed. Any donations to the bank’s plight can be made at the branch of any BNZ. I didn’t write BNZ Bank because that fully extended would stand for Bank of New Zealand bank and that is an example of RAS syndrome, that is short for Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome. People who come up with such terms as RAS syndrome can be jerks sometimes.

Another time when there’s a conflict is when someone wants discretion but someone tells of that same discretion in a public place. The example of this is the Semisonic song Secret Smile. It’s good to know there’s a secret smile being performed but singing about it and making it a chart hit means that the secrecy has well and truly gone. Doing a secret smile to someone would assumedly mean that the person who is the recipient of it would keep it to themselves and not perform a song about it at every concert they perform in.

To Semisonic’s credit they did not disclose the identity of the person doing the secret smile or how the secret smile was in fact different from a normal smile. Also not being discussed was whether the secret smile was towards Semisonic’s main man and songwriter Dan Wilson or the entire Semisonic band, which were two other people alongside Dan. I suppose the line “you got a secret smile and you use it only for me” hints that only Mr Wilson was subjected to it.

Not sure that this particular paragraph fits in with the theme of the rest of the newsletter but it did help the word count.