Source: Radio New Zealand
On Monday night, Maarire Brunning-Kouka aka MĀ was sheltering in her little Haitaitai flat with her partner and their two cats.
But just like every time Wellington gets a big weather warning, she jumped into gear preparing evacuation supplies, fuelling up her car and ensuring friends, family and neighbours were “all goods”.
“Even though it’s kind of a really scary situation, I feel like I was born for it, eh. I’m ready to go.
“I want to be someone that my community can call on if they need a hand getting out of floods, or if they need to know how to prep. Even when my friends are going to go look for a new house, some of them send me images like, ‘I’m kind of living on this bank. What do you reckon about this?’” she tells RNZ’s Nine to Noon.
Brunning-Kouka, who works in pest and predator control, scored three nominations at this year’s Aotearoa Music Awards for her second album Blame It On The Weather.
A self-taught musician and the daughter of playwright Hone Kouka and the late actress Nancy Brunning, Brunning-Kouka only started making music five years ago after a friend said, “Are you going to commit to this or not?”
From American soul singer Erykah Badu, she learned how to “go deep, but be very specific about which words I want to use” and from King Kapisi how to “articulate her concerns”.
On Blame It On The Weather for which Brunning-Kouka is nominated for Album of the Year, Best Māori Artist and Best Alternative Breakthrough Artist, conserving our land and water is central.
On tracks like ‘Traps Jam’ and ‘Hoki Atu Mate’, she raps about pest and predator control, her speciality after studying conservation at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.
Weaving observations from the ngahere [forest] into songs is a way to “realise and execute her responsibilities as tangata whenua“, she says.
“I really wanted to showcase how much mahi we do, and the variety of it, to influence people to look outside and think: what’s your thing that you want to keep an eye on, or monitor, or observe? I wanted people to understand that the taiao [environment] is everywhere, and we need to start observing and being more present with it”, Brunning-Kouka told RNZ’s Music 101 last year.
While the hip-hop/soul artist still feels like a pēpi [baby] in the music industry, sharing messages of environmentalism and indigenous empowerment is for her a long game.
“It’s not Hunger Games, where it’s just like one movie and then you’re done, you know. This is forever.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
