Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air
Lady Shaka is an interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa who has built a fanbase around the world as a leading Pacific DJ. At the age of 14 she won the hip-hop world title for dance under Parris Goebel’s Royal Family and created London’s first-ever club night celebrating Pacific culture called Pulotu Underworld.
Based in the UK, Lady Shaka’s flair for mixing Pacific Island music with modern club sounds is what catapulted her DJ career into an international success. When the biggest platform for underground club culture, Boiler Room, debuted in New Zealand alongside Auckland’s QTBIPOC nightlife space FILTH, Lady Shaka’s DJ set erupted online.
Lady Shaka spoke with Breanna Tugaga-Rogers about being an international Afro-Pasifika DJ, winning hip-hop world titles and celebrating her Pasifika heritage by taking island music to the world.
You recently toured around Asia which looked amazing, how was that whole experience for you?
It was really, really amazing. Such a beautiful experience! I met so many amazing and talented DJs and producers from Japan and from India as well. It was really cool to see what their music scene was like and to experience something different from the Europe route or the Australia, New Zealand kind of crowd, so it was completely different! I think it was just really beautiful to see, especially for me in India, to see brown DJs, you know local DJs filling up the spaces and like, bringing in crowds doing music that they love to do, mixing their cultural music with modern club sounds which is essentially what I’ve been doing and a lot of other DJs have been doing with our Pacific Island music. They’re doing that in India! It was just so refreshing to see that happening in a completely different country. So yeah it was just an amazing experience and I really can’t wait to go back!
What was it like playing in such different places compared to NZ and the UK?
The main thing for me really I was quite shocked that my music had I guess reached that far, that people in India and Japan knew who I was as a DJ so that for me was a big thing in itself. Turning up to gigs and having, I guess, fans in Japan with like little t-shirts that they had made that said Lady Shaka on it or people bringing me gifts to my gigs and it was just a crazy experience. I think they have a big appreciation for international artists because they don’t always get DJs, especially from New Zealand coming over and sharing their music. It was really beautiful for me to see how many people were dying to hear Pacific music, the music that they had heard in my Boiler Room set. They were like, ‘ohhh what’s that Māori song? *starts singing* whaka-awe-awe-awe-e!’ And I was like ‘WHAT!’ like y’all literally studied my set?! So it was beautiful to see that. It was really cool in Japan too, there’s quite a bit of a Pacific Island community there so it was cool to see some of them rolling through to my gigs overseas so yeah, it was cool to see how much of an impact one video can do for your career. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to be like, it was only six years ago when I first moved to London and I was having to do jobs that I’m not really enjoying. Fast forward six years later, I’m living full-time as a DJ, producer and artist! It’s surreal to be doing that in a country where I’m not actually from. I’m really blessed and honoured because not every DJ is able to have that experience.
You well and truly represent the Moana across the globe, capturing the essence of the Pacific, what is that experience like?
It feels great when you play at a festival to a really big crowd that’s not in New Zealand or Australia and you make the whole crowd yell CHEEHOO over the mic. It’s such a crazy feeling when you see so many people enjoying your music and it’s the music that- far I don’t know about your generation or people you grew up with but like when I was at school, it wasn’t cool to play loud island music out in public or like when your dad or mum picked you up from school and they’re playing loud island music it was like oh my god, can you please turn it down? It’s embarrassing! And to now see that younger generation of school children playing our tunes, you know? And all these DJs, producers and pioneers that are out there like yo our music is so cool! It is so dope to be Tagata Moana, it’s amazing to be Māori, it’s amazing to be Samoan, Tongan, wherever you’re from! I think it’s such a humbling feeling. It’s also that whole thing of like, the reclamation of culture and you know, reclaiming all of the things that people before us may have been ashamed of or like, you know, our grandparents who came here as immigrants or even on my Māori side, our language wasn’t even allowed to be spoken at schools! Now being in a place where it’s on the radio, it’s on TV, it’s everywhere. So being able to celebrate all of that is something that is very humbling and I feel honored to be one of those people that’s apart of that cultural shift.
That’s so beautiful! Let’s talk about the NZ FILTH Boiler Room, people say it was the first time there’s been Māori/Pasifika representation on that global platform. What was your plan going into it?
All of us were very, very nervous. We’d been practising our sets, putting music together and I was just like, oh I’ve got it but it’s missing a few things like, let’s add this and I kept changing it. It wasn’t actually until the day of I was like, ‘I’m gonna take my poi with me and I’m gonna play Kotahitanga as my intro,’ so that was never always gonna be my intro. I was hemming and hawwing like, ‘do I play SWIDT as my intro?’ and then I was like, hang on, let’s start with something that represents tangata whenua because I’m tangata whenua and it’s really important to acknowledge the indigenous people of the land. And just before I started playing, I was like you know what, I want my Boiler Room set to be for our people! Not necessarily for people around the world to be like oh my god, this is what they got going on in New Zealand but to be like, I want everyone here that is brown, that is Māori, that is Pasifika, that is black to be like, ‘I see myself through you’ and I have that energy.
There’s so many parts you don’t see on the video but at the very end, when I told all the islanders to come to the front, the entire front and behind me was packed with islanders, the security guards ran from upstairs and they were at the front going ‘CHEEEEEHOOOOOOO!’. I was teary! These are moments that I will never forget and to this day, that feeling of having all your people at the front screaming, it was like, this is why I do the work that I do, this is why I play the music that I play, is to emote that feeling within our people and for them to be like yes I’m a proud Samoan and I’m going to siva mai, siva mai! I didn’t expect the video to change my career the way it has. I remember sitting there with my mum and my dad and being like, ‘mum I just got messages from this country, from that country, like Dad look at this! They want me to do this thing here.’ It’s been a platform to get that Pasifika voice out there even more to the rest of the world. I’m really thankful that I was able to have that opportunity to share the way that I think about music and the way that I love music with the rest of the world.
It was such an iconic moment! Can you give us a bit of background as to how you got into becoming a DJ?
I started DJing in 2018 and before that, I grew up dancing, it was everything to me. I was involved in a lot of different hip-hop dance crews and used to compete overseas all the way up until the end of high school. During that time we use to make mixes for our dance competitions so I’ve always loved music because dance and music go hand in hand. I’ve always had that relationship even with the way I DJ now, it’s very much like how a dancer would DJ because I DJ to make people dance, essentially that’s my goal.
So I started off doing that, I used to make these remixes when I was twelve and put them on the internet. Then in 2018, it was my leaving party from London, my visa had finished and I decided to teach myself how to use the decks. I was like, ‘I’m gonna hire a club and DJ my own leaving party’ (laughs), so I did that and I really enjoyed being able to control the energy of the crowd. Then I moved back to NZ and my friends had just started FILTH and some of my other friends were running parties too and I said to them, ‘oh I’ve just started DJing in the UK, I would love to DJ at your event’, so I played my very first FILTH and from there it just kept building. It was a little bit like ‘fake it ‘till you make it’ but also I was in the background practicing all the time, putting music together, trying to find new music, trying to find new ways of transitioning music and making my own mark on the music I was playing. Then I moved back to the UK and got really involved with the QTBIPOC scene in London. My first big break was working with the artist IAMDDB as her former DJ. That really started to open up that international working regime and it just kept growing from there!
You danced with the Royal Family, with Parris Goebel and you even won world titles! What was it like doing this as a teenager?
Basically, I was in a hip-hop career competing since I was eight years old. The Desire Dance Academy in Ōtara was the first academy that took me to the States. To have that training from a young age, like being made to run around places and stuff really put this mentality into my head as a kid to be disciplined and that if you really want something, you need to work at it and work hard. Talent’s not gonna get you the whole way, it can only get you so far but you need to have the work ethic to make it go even further. So that was very much instilled in me as a child. I think I was 14 when we won the World Hip Hop Championship, so to have those experiences when you work so hard for something and then you get to the top of that mountain, like it’s such a beautiful experience and it’s something I’ll never forget. I did really think that dance was going to be my life. My goal was actually to be a choreographer and a backup dancer for Beyoncé and all the top artists. I planned to originally move to LA and I was gonna go to this place to try get this agent to sign me so I could audition. I had done so much research over all of the years of school and somehow I ended up in the UK, where I knew nothing about the place for one and I found myself becoming a DJ. But I’m really happy like, this is my calling, something that I was meant to do.
So you’re Afro-Pasifika and there are many layers to your cultural identity as someone who is mixed. How has it been for you navigating these different worlds of ancestry?
It’s been a very interesting journey for me. I went through Māori schooling since primary so I was very much raised in te ao Māori but then I also had my Pacific side as well where I was able to learn about that but unfortunately, I didn’t have the privilege of growing up with the Samoan, Tongan and Tokelauan language as it wasn’t available for me to learn. I guess it was that whole thing of when your grandparents move over from the islands, they either want your children to learn the language or they don’t want them to learn it so that they have good English to ‘be successful’, without realizing there’s always going to be something missing if they don’t have that. With my Afro side, I didn’t really grow up with that. There were a few of us who were Māori and black that were at schools that I went to growing up but those conversations weren’t ones that we had within my family, we just knew what our heritage was. But there’s always going to be that ancestral linkage or feeling when you start to delve into your culture, no matter whether it’s black culture, Pacific culture, Māori, you always have that feeling. I guess that was something that, the older I got I was able to explore more when I met other people from the African diaspora. The island I come from is Cape Verde and it’s quite different because there’s not really a Cape Verde community at all in NZ but there are in Hawai’i, Tokelau and Samoa. Being someone who is mixed, your experience in terms of the way you see your culture and the way you relate to your culture is always going to be different because it’s so layered. It’s been beautiful for me to see people who are mixed just doing their thing and bringing together different worlds, the worlds that make them who they are to make beautiful things happen. I’m very proud to be Pasifika and indigenous.
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Adding in that other layer where you’re also a part of the Takatāpui, Rainbow community, how important do you think it is to have these nightlife spaces in NZ for black, brown, queer people of color?
For me, it’s about that visibility of seeing someone who is queer, who is brown, who is POC in the front doing stuff, it’s having someone who looks like you who has the same kind of experience. With FILTH, without having that space, that community, things like Boiler Room wouldn’t have happened you know? So it’s super important. Queer, black and brown people want spaces where they can be their unapologetic selves, where they can feel safe, where people aren’t staring at them and vilifying them for being themselves.
I was talking about this with a few of my straight, white, male friends like you can go into a space and feel relatively safe, you can walk into any club and no one’s gonna harass you for the way you look or because you’re acting a certain way. They can just walk and live their life. That’s not the same experience for queer, black and brown people so we need these spaces where we can have that same feeling. Especially for the younger ones, some of them are still trying to find themselves so it’s important for us to curate these spaces where they can explore that, where they can get away from whatever may be going on in their lives. I always get really excited when I see other young, brown, queer DJs and artists coming up because I’m like look, you’re literally out there resisting against society and against all of the things that are put on us, not only are you queer but you’re also a person of color so you have that double experience of being different.
