The oral history of Dei Hamo’s ‘We Gon’ Ride’
The Spinoff Daily, Friday May 5
Ahiahi mārie, welcome to The Spinoff Daily.
Today on The Spinoff, Duncan Greive considers Buzzfeed, Vice and the end of an online era, Charlotte Muru-Lanning meets the man reviewing every fish and chip shop in Christchurch and Stewart Sowman-Lund investigates the royal lineage of Mike Hosking’s new shoes.
But first, Alex Casey presents the complete oral history of Dei Hamo’s 2004 classic ‘We Gon’ Ride’.
“I knew it needed some kind of theme. Scribe had just made ‘Stand Up’, and the theme of that was for all the New Zealand artists to stand up, and I thought, OK, if he’s talking to the artists then I need to talk to the common man. What was a community I could get on board with? Boy racers. Everyone loves their cars, so for a long time I had been thinking about doing a song with cars. That idea was germinating when I got this instrumental off Chong Nee and the chorus immediately came to me: ‘We gon’ ride tonight’.
So now I had this phrase and I quickly had the chorus. The next step was that I actually started imagining what the music video would be, and wrote the verses almost like a treatment for the video within the song. I knew what I wanted to see visually, so I was trying to write the most ridiculous lyrics possible – I want to be 50 Cent, I want snakeskin Timberlands, I want Anna Pacquin, I want X-Men, I want Paul Holmes. I wanted to be topical and funny and make the content feel really New Zealand-focussed.”
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A message from Alex Casey, senior writer and host of The Real Pod
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Mike Hosking thinks he just bought the king’s coronation shoes. Really?
“Apparently, Mike Hosking will be wearing the exact same shoes as King Charles on Saturday night (minus a “gold royal buckle”). Or will he?
Having been the victim of an upsell or two in the past myself, this too-good-to-be-true shoe story left me a little suspicious. Had Hosking really stumbled upon some truly two-of-a-kind royal footwear? Or had a crafty shop attendant spotted a naïve New Zealander from a mile away, and recognised the potential for an easy – and expensive – sale?”
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