Pete's Log: A Hill in New Zealand
Entry #2666, (Music, Random Crap)(posted when I was 46 years old.)
Today, I became aware of the song Open Road by Ra Costelloe. In it, he names a number of places, including Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (at roughly 2:03). This is a hill in New Zealand, perhaps best known for having (allegedly) the longest place name.
The singing of "Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu" elicited a vague tingle of familiarity, and in online discussion of the song, I found that this is not the first song to feature Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu in its lyrics. One song mentioned was Raumschiff Edelweiss by Edelweiss. Raumschiff Edelweiss, I read, is a Star Trek parody euro dance groove, in which Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu is what the Klingons sing (at roughly 1:15). A description like that results in an immediate click from me, and when I listened to the Klingons in that song sing Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, I immediately remembered where I knew it from.
The first Compact Disc (or CD if you will) that I ever owned is One Love by Dr. Alban, which was gifted to me in early 1993. Track 9 on that album is "Groove Machine 5". Even though I rarely listen to Dr. Alban these days, that album was in heavy rotation back in the day. And since Dr. Alban is originally from Nigeria, I had always assumed the lyrics to Groove Machine 5 were perhaps in his native language. That, I now know, is not the case. The lyrics to Groove Machine 5 are the name of a hill in New Zealand, repeated over and over.
As best I can tell, Dr. Alban and Edelweiss both sampled Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu from The Lone Ranger, a 1976 song by Quantum Jump.
I came across one other song that samples Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu from The Lone Ranger: Tribal Chant by Jay Vegas. I wonder if there are more.
One last note regarding Edelweiss: Wikipedia claims they wrote their biggest hit by following The Manual, KLF's instructions on how to write a hit song. And KLF was probably in heaviest rotation for me around the same time as Dr. Alban. And thus everything ties back together. To a hill in New Zealand. Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu.