A landmark NZ album was lost for 27 years. It’s just been found.

Dam Native's debut, acclaimed as an Aotearoa hip-hop classic, has been missing since 1997. Why?

Daniel Haimona rolls his head back, his shaggy hair shaking out behind him as he laughs at the sky. “It happens all the time, bro, all the time,” he says. “Just the other day, my niece said to me, ‘Are you going to put it on Spotify? Why isn’t it on Spotify?’”

As the front man for seminal 90s Aotearoa rap crew Dam Native, Haimona is used to this question. He hears it constantly. “Every day’s similar: ‘I can’t hear it on Spotify,’” he says. He puffs out a plume of vape smoke. “That hasn’t stopped.”

Family members and fans ask that question because everyone wants to know what’s happened to a piece of Haimona’s past, a cherished taonga, something he’s tried to shake but can’t. Where is Dam Native's debut album Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted?

I want to know too. Released in 1997, it was our first rap record to embrace Māoridom, addressing the social and political times using te reo. It is, according to Audioculture, a classic, among “the best hip-hop albums ever to have come out of Aotearoa … every rhyme delivered with conviction, every beat world class.”

It was, says Haimona, the result of a hip-hop obsessed kid soaking up the 90s. He overheard his parents and grandparents arguing “heatedly” about politics. “We’d had Muldoon-ism, Rogernomics,” he says. “At the same time, we’d had a renaissance of … te kōhanga reo, te reo Māori. I’d go into this deep dive of Aotearoa, it’s history, te ao Māori, culture, the whole thing.”

At the same time, he’d become infatuated with American hip-hop, playing rap songs on his small tape deck so frequently his grandfather threw it out the window. “I’d blast Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, all those old school cats,” he says. “That collision of my upbringing, and being an obsessed kid, is how you get Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted.”

(An interesting fact: Zane Lowe produced much of Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted; Audioculture has more on the group’s formation and the album’s production here.)

Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted was a big deal when it came out. It won Dam Native several New Zealand Music Awards. It led to major festival tours and opening slots for Ice T and Public Enemy. Yet, since its original release, it’s disappeared. It was never pressed on vinyl. Only a handful of CDs were ever released. It’s never been on streaming services.

So people keep bugging Haimona about it. Why can’t they hear it? “I let them go on their rant,” he says. “I play along like I’m lazy and dumb, like I don't care.” Part of his reluctance was that he didn’t support streaming services. “Multinational companies? Same old stuff, man: greed,” he says. “It’s daylight robbery.”

But he was also reluctant to look back. It didn’t feel right. “It had done its job. I achieved a lot with that album,” Haimona says. “It fulfilled my life so much. I wear it like a taonga around my neck. I wanted to be the greatest Māori MC at the time, and I achieved that. I personally didn’t need for it to be anywhere.”

Over the years, the album’s absence meant its mana kept growing. Some bootlegged it. Others uploaded it to YouTube and streamed it there. “I first heard this on a stolen CD … in the year 2000,” remembers one online fan. Others hunt for the few CDs that remain in circulation. They pay top dollar for it: Discogs reports one sold for $326.35.

Sony Music noticed. The label’s commercial and licensing director Gareth Brown says it was going for “crazy prices”. He approached Haimona to see if he’d be interested in giving his album the re-release treatment. He expressed reluctance. “People were talking to me about what I’d done 15 years ago, 20 years ago. That didn’t sit right with me as an artist,” he says.

Brown kept encouraging him, telling Haimona, “You’ve got to set it free.” Finally, Haimona agreed. But he couldn’t find the original recordings that would aid the remastering process. “I lost the masters, bro,” he admits. “I haven’t seen them since 1990-something. They were in my pocket [but] they’re long gone … probably in a drunken stupor, a drugged-out stupor. I don’t know who has them. I tried. Nup. Gone.”

Brown found a solution. A copy of the rare CD was pulled from Sony’s archives and sent to Chris Chetland at Kog Studio to be remastered. And so, this past Friday, Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted was finally uploaded to streaming platforms. Vinyl has been pressed for the first time: it’s in blood red, and available now.

For the first time since 1997, Haimona’s album is being celebrated all over again. His niece can listen to it on Spotify. All those questions about where it is will stop.

But Haimona says the re-release has had a different impact on him. He hasn’t released new music in more than 10 years, instead recording songs in his Piha home studio and stockpiling them on a hard drive in between surfing sessions. He blames “fear and perfectionism” for holding back. Seeing the love for Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted has opened the floodgates. “I’m ready to go,” he says. “I’m having another run.”

Come this Friday, Haimona says he’ll begin releasing new music again, setting free some of the songs he’s been sitting on all those years. His eyes light up, his shaggy hair sits motionless. Suddenly, there’s an intensity about him. “It’s made me pull the trigger on this. It’s a big moment,” he says. “What I’ve got is fire.”

Stream Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted here; vinyl can be ordered here.

For the past year, I’ve been banging on about the importance of journalism that embraces, music, the arts, and culture in the face of steep declines. So it was nice to read this Newsroom story about a huge increase in readership for RNZ. The reason? Broadening the site’s scope to include more lifestyle and arts stories in the mix. See? It works. But we could always do better. If you’d like to support what I’m doing here, you can upgrade your subscription using the bright blue button below…

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Bonus beats.