It was a hugely powerful moment, but the conversation itself isn't entirely new. Back in September, Moana Maniapoto (who you should know from her time in Moana and the Moahunters and Moana and the Tribe) issued her own wake-up call to the music industry when she was inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame.
As she put it herself, when you don't hear someone like you on the radio or see someone like you on TV, it's easy to come to the conclusion that maybe your culture just doesn't matter. It's time we stopped making excuses for it.
Like Moana, who believes we need a quota for Māori music on radio and television, Aaradhna also offered a simple solution to push things forward: ditch the "urban" title entirely (#BREAKING: the word has nothing to do with music, or race for that matter) and instead have separate awards for both New Zealand hip hop and New Zealand R&B/soul. If there's room for a Roots genre—whatever the hell that is meant to be—then surely there's more than enough space to recognise two very different artists regardless of what they look like.
"I had to say it," Aaradhna told RNZ last night. "I had to let it out."
Hopefully this time next year we won't be rolling our eyes so much.
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