FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
A millionaires club of one
Friday, July 18
Max's Cafe"Pauly Fuemana is OMC." So reads a line from some record company promotional material on the man behind the international hit single, "How Bizarre" (and I'm talking international; number one on the charts in Australia, Ireland, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, South Africa and Canada). Besides stating the obvious, namely that OMC is virtually a solo deal for Fuemana, the line is telling in another way; for most of his life Pauly has struggled to break free of not only the violence, but also the numbing conformity of gang life. Pauly Fuemana is OMC, not his gang and not his crew.
Raised in Otara, the poorest part of an otherwise wealthy nation, New Zealand, he used to live a life of long days on welfare, running with his boys in what he describes as a virtual Polynesian ghetto.
"Otara is sort of one of those places you don't venture into at night," he says. "We all know each other there, but it's pretty difficult for outsiders to communicate with us because over the years everyone in Otara feels like they've been duped by the government.
"It got really gang influenced and at a young age everyone had to get into that sort of vibe," he continues. "It happened to me 10 years ago and it's taken 10 years to shake it off my system. I'm still in a situation where I'm trying to be more professional. In the old days my brother and I would just smash someone up and it wouldn't be a problem. It's taken me 10 years to shake off that sort of vibe."
His remedy for the bleak-future blues came in a familiar form (especially in alienated youth / rags-to-riches stories): he started a band. Dubbing themselves the Otara Millionaires Club as a joke on their community's economic status, the original OMC were a hip hop / rock hybrid that eventually degenerated back into the very thing Pauly was trying to escape.
"We wanted to show people we weren't all crims, but the thing is the Otara Millionaires Club became more of a gang presence than a musical one," he says. "The entertainment value went out the toilet hole. I didn't want to backtrack so I dropped the whole band."
What he didn't drop was the name (or at least its acronym) and with the help of a supportive new manager, Pauly began to shop around some new songs, including "How Bizarre," a breezy little hip hop / pop number that ignited like an LA hills brush fire.
"It's really crazy because that song was written, recorded and promoted in New Zealand so I was surrounded by 30 people saying, 'Mate, that track is whack.'"
Luckily, that sentiment wasn't shared by many other people. Besides the track's number one status in the seven aforementioned countries, it's also made it, at last count, into the Top 10 of almost every other European nation. Needless to say, the song was written during a time when Pauly probably never imagined such a... well, bizarre turn of events in his life.
"I Just walked into a mall in Kitchener and all these people were following me around and going, 'Wow, how does it feel?' But, I haven't really stepped back to look. This is the first time in my life I've really had something to do. Usually we were all on the benefit, on the dole."
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