How Bizarre

The video cost $7,000, paid by NZ On Air. Director Lee Baker shot it on a soundstage in Ponsonby and at Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland, with OMC's singer Pauly Fuemana at the wheel of a 1968 Chevrolet Impala, dancing, rapping, throwing money around and breathing fire. It came out in late 1995, shortly before the song hit number one in New Zealand, and was eventually shown on US networks around 15,000 times. Fuemana wrote and produced How Bizarre with Alan Jansson, and it sounds like nothing else from Auckland at the time: The Guardian described a proto-electro beat, funky mariachi guitar, Tex-Mex trumpets, close female harmonies and a goofy rap, and called the result supernaturally summery. It topped the charts in New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Canada and Ireland, five weeks at number one in Australia alone. In the United States it was released only to radio, which under the rules of the day meant it could not enter the Billboard Hot 100 at all. It topped the Pop Airplay chart instead and reached number four on the Hot 100 Airplay. Outside New Zealand OMC are remembered as one-hit wonders, though at home they had further hits. The song kept turning up in films such as The Parent Trap, re-entered the New Zealand chart after Fuemana's death in 2010, and in 2021 found a new life on TikTok, where the hashtag drew more than 1.4 billion views. A cheap video and a Polynesian pop song with a Spanish guitar turned out to have a very long summer.