Spotlight back on Dawn Raid
Dawn Raid’s creators say the South Auckland record label was borne from a positive place but was often misunderstood, and they won’t rule out a rebirth, writes David Skipwith.
It is, on paper at least, an unlikely foundation for a game-changing record label. It was 1999 when Andy Murnane and Tanielu Leaosavai’i (aka Brotha D) met at Manukau Polytechnic’s business school. Buoyed by the enterprising spirit, their friendship turned to commerce, starting with the pair hustling bootleg T-shirts at
O¯ tara Markets, before eventually running a music empire unlike anything the local industry had seen before, breaking records and barriers for more than a decade.
The duo behind Dawn Raid Entertainment, New Zealand’s most iconic Polynesian music label, hope a new documentary will set the record straight on the legacy of their business and South Auckland hip-hop culture.
With former gang leader Brotha D’s keen ear for musical talent and high school dropout Murnane’s entrepreneurial drive, Dawn Raid launched the talents of local rap and R&B stars such as Savage, Mareko, Aaradhna, and Deceptikonz, and gave a voice to a disenfranchised Pacific community.
Their first compilation, Southside Story, was released in 2000, and featured future radio regulars including Adeaze and Ill Semantics. It was made on a shoestring, but they were officially making music.
‘‘The No 1 motivation was to showcase the amazing Polynesian talent,’’ Brotha D says.
‘‘The youth of today will always find their voice and it just so happens in our time it was [through] hip-hop music. It happens in every generation. It happened with rock’n’roll.
‘‘We loved hip-hop, and we just wanted to tell our stories with the hip-hop background. That’s what it was for us.’’
The pair’s rise, and very public fall, is ripe material for the just released feature-length documentary, Dawn Raid.
Directed by Oscar Kightley, the film charts the incredible run of money and success that took the label’s music to the world, before some shortsighted business decisions, unpaid tax bills, fractured relationships with artists, and a rapidly changing music industry combined to bring a final, cruel end to the dream ride by 2011.
But before it went bad, it was good.
With American hip-hop dominating mainstream youth culture around the globe, Dawn Raid struck a chord with young Kiwi music fans and attracted big corporate sponsors in the process. All eyes were on them and, as the label’s status grew, they expanded their Papatoetoe base to include a retail clothing store, a barber shop, a local bar, a community trust and, eventually, a music studio and office space complete with boardroom. The label made it all the way to New York, recording with the likes of Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck.
But in the beginning, wider New Zealand and much of the media was struggling to understand hip-hop culture, and not everyone thought Dawn Raid were making positive contributions to their local community. The pair remember how local police didn’t exactly rush to help when the label found themselves the target of a series of burglaries.
‘‘The police knew me and my brothers and my history,’’ Brotha D says.
‘‘And they never understood hip-hop music, so when those [burglaries] were going on they’d be driving by and saying ‘it’s that type of music you guys are making’, and all these sorts of comments.’’
Negative stereotypes were easy to apply, but Murnane insists Dawn Raid were often misunderstood. He believes they had far more in common with legendary United States soul and R&B labels Motown and Stax, rather than notorious Los Angeles-based gangster rap label, Death Row Records.
‘‘I think we get that judgment because it’s South
Auckland, but the truth is Brotha D and I were trying to change our lives and the music we were making was positive, but you wouldn’t know that if [you didn’t] listen to it,’’ he said.
‘‘The Motown model was about forming as many groups as you can, and filtering them through a system where we teach them how to dance, sing, behave, dress. It was a lifestyle.
‘‘We were uplifting the kids. We were teaching them how to get a passport, travel, finance. It was a lot more than just music.’’
He says for them, it was about doing good, and leading with hope.
‘‘We were never about gangsterism. We were leaving the gangster lifestyle and coming to a positive place.’’
Dawn Raid had its supporters though, and none more powerful or influential than former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark.
Clark’s insistence that New Zealand artists make up at least 20 per cent airplay on New Zealand radio stations benefited the likes of Dawn Raid, while Brotha D and Murnane remember her being comfortable among the Pasifika community.
‘‘The Labour Government has always been about helping people,’’ said Brotha D.
‘‘Helen could see what we were trying to do and that we were trying to do better.
‘‘She had a lot of great Pacific people and advisers in her team [who] understood what was going on in the community, and they understood the importance of who we were to the youth. Helen loved that, and she was a big fan of Adeaze, and she was a regular shopper at the markets.’’
Dawn Raid’s golden era may be long gone but Murnane and Brotha D remain shareholders in the catalogue, and won’t rule out resurrecting the label once more in some shape or form.
‘‘We’d love to see the catalogue re-released on vinyl, we’d love to see the legacy of our master recordings . . . left for the next generation. In the future, absolutely, we’d like to see the catalogues protected and looked after, and new talent too.’’
Dawn Raid is in cinemas no.