OMC: The Tragic Story of How Bizarre & Pauly Fuemana

OMC - The sad story of the song How Bizarre and leader Pauly Fuemana

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Best known for their hit song How Bizarre, OMC’s hit track was inescapable in the mid 90’s.. It would be a number one hit in both Canada and the US, it would reach the top 10 in over a dozen countries and resulted in their lone album selling millions of copies worldwide. The group’s sole album appropriately titled how bizarre would be new zealand’s biggest selling musical export. While How Bizarre was an upbeat song, OMC’s career was not. Drugs, gangs, lawsuits and health issues plagued the group and that’s what were going to explore in today’s video.

Pauly Fuemana would be the brainchild of OMC. He would be born in the late 60’s to polynesian parents in the impoverished auckland suburb of otara. Growing up in a difficult set of circumstances Fuemana was no stranger to the police frequently committing crimes, spending time in youth prison and getting involved with gangs, Amongst all the turmoil in Fuemana’s life he found joy in creating music with his brothers and sister. By the 80’s Fuemana was performing with an R&B group called House Party which included his brothers Phil and Tony and his sister Christine. He would start out as a dancer before teaching himself guitar and eventually singing background vocals for the group.The group would eventually change their name to Fuemana and released an album in 1993 on their own indie label. It would be the same year that Fuemana founded a new group called OMC which stood for the Otara Millionaire’s Club, which featured his brother Paul. Little did they know that in just a few short years that name would ring true, but it would come at a cost.

OMC’s early music resembled the rap that was popular in america at the time and while their early shows attracted some big crowds it was the wrong type of people. According to billboard magazine Otara’s Millionaire’s Club shows to see audience members from US exported gangs including the bloods and the crypts and it was at that point that Fuemana decided to quit the group, take the OMC name with him and start from scratch. His new music would draw on more of his south pacific roots. He would tell billboard in 1997 “we were doing all these gigs and gang members started showing up. In Auckland there is a very bad bloods and crips situation. I just decided to try and steer away from that and go in another direction where i could grow and get more into music that i wanted to make.” Helping Fuemana would be a producer named Alan Janseen who produced an underground New Zealand compilation record called “Proud” highlighting artists from South Auckland. OMC's contribution to the record would, We R the OMC.

Janseen and Fuemana would start writing songs together with the pair coming up with 8 songs in just 4 hours, one of which was How Bizarre. Originally titled Duff It Up, the name was quickly changed to How Bizarre. Author Simon Grigg who wrote a book about Fuemana would explain the origins of the song’s influences telling The Star newspaper “It has the Mariachi trumpets there which Pauly got from listening to Herb Alpert records when he was a kid,”.
“And the acoustic guitar is an Alan thing, from hearing folk rock on the radio, and Pauly’s vocal is almost a hip hop consciousness-style. So it was all these elements mixed together.
“And Alan's wife kept on saying ‘how bizarre’ about things, and we thought ‘that's a good phrase.’ You’d say something to her, and she’d go ‘how bizarre’. So it came from her.”
The day following that marathon writing session, OMC was booked to play big day out festival in auckland where they debuted the song live for the first time. It was a disastrous gig, people walked out on fuemana, but despite their poor live reception Australia seemed to love Paul with Rolling Stone referring to Fuemana”the marvin ****e of the pacific.” By late 1995 OMC would issue their debut album titled How Bizarre on local indie label Huh. It became a massive seller in New Zeland moving about 35,000 units.

The album would be distributed worldwide by major label Mercury-Polygram Records A spokesperson from the label would tell billboard “people here felt strongly about the album and song, but international sales don’t always translate because