SHAPIRO: You talk about singing with your ancestors and the idea of everybody being interconnected as siblings. GANG OF YOUTHS: (Singing) Out of the way. Maybe there's something of the ethers, you know, the shema (ph), as they say in Judaism, you know, like something of the spirit going upwards. And I think there's a bit of poetry in that, considering I'm singing to a man who's dead and can't hear it. I wanted to sing along with my ancestors and people who lived 40, 50 years ago. LE'AUPEPE: That was part of the intention. But I want to become my own man, I guess. SHAPIRO: Well, there's also this act of adding your voice literally to the chorus. ![]() And I think using some of these recordings as a way of connecting me back to that original place, that Eden-like Pacifica moment, and that helped me attach myself to, I guess, the new reality of who I am. I think one of the things that my father did instill in me especially was that as Pacific and Maori people, we share a common bond that makes us closer than cousins, that we're siblings in this overarching Indigenous story. And I think for me, it's not necessarily just about belonging to a Samoan identity. Yeah, it's from Mangaia, which is an island in what's known as the Cook Islands in the Pacific. There are other new recordings of Pacific Islander voices on this album, but this one is an old one. It was reported by going to David Fanshawe, who's a composer who dedicated a lot of his life to preserving Indigenous music for posterity, protecting it from. I think it has a really poignant impact on my own life even listening to some of that stuff. SHAPIRO: Does this reflect something about the way that you are relating to your Samoan heritage or your father's Samoan identity? (SOUNDBITE OF GANG OF YOUTHS SONG, "THE MAN HIMSELF") SHAPIRO: There are a lot of tracks on this album where we hear the voices of Pacific Islanders, like in the opening of the man himself. Unfortunately, that concealment just led to one of more issues of my own identity and the way that I relate to my own culture. And I think in terms of protecting us from a racism element or even a class element that he struggled with when he was a young man, he wanted to conceal us from that reality. LE'AUPEPE: I think that in my father's generation, especially with his sort of lack of wealth and status in a colonial society like New Zealand or Australia, felt it necessary to protect us from maybe a past that he had to leave behind, some that he felt was necessary to abandon for the sake of the future. So how do you reconcile those two ideas, that he lied to you, but maybe it was because he thought that that was for the best? But then you go on to say that maybe he pretended he was half white to give his kids a better chance. But I went and found his birth certificate, and he lied about that, too. We thought that he was only half Samoan, that his mother was a German Jew. Thought he was brought up in New Zealand, but he was born and brought up in Samoa. GANG OF YOUTHS: (Singing) Thought he was born in 1948, but was born a whole decade before. ![]() You lay out pretty specifically what you learned in the song "Brothers," which is maybe the most literal track on the album. SHAPIRO: There were clues in an immigration case file. But he did mention some locales in Samoa that sounded like they might be worth checking out. LE'AUPEPE: I started asking questions and trying to sort of catch him out, maybe a bit exploitatively because he was (unintelligible) at that point, hoping that he might let something slip, and he never did. Near the end of his father's life, Dave Le'aupepe probed for more. He said he was 1 of 8 siblings with a Samoan father and a white mother. His father claimed to have been born in New Zealand and immigrated to Australia. The new album "Angel In Real Time" documents what he learned.ĭAVE LE'AUPEPE: Growing up, my dad was pretty, I want to say, reticent to say anything about his own family, his own context, where he was born. And only after that did Dave uncover the life story his father had always told wasn't his real family history. SHAPIRO: The man who passed was the father of lead singer Dave Le'aupepe. GANG OF YOUTHS: (Singing) I prayed the day you passed, but the heavens didn't listen, so we held you till your dark skin dulled to fair. The new album from the band Gang of Youths begins at the bedside of a dying man.
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