"I didn't write politically conscious songs or songs that talked about the skin colour of my first child. I didn't write those things, saying, I'm going to change the world and this is how I'm going to do it. I wrote those songs, because that's the way that I felt, like everything that I do with my music. There’s not a disconnection, and it's just a focus on 'how can I market and get my music out'. I write my music the way that I feel. And that's all it is. Because my music is an expression of how I feel as a distinction. It’s not a commodity to be packaged up. And that's what was happening when I was 19, when 'role model' was put on me as a label. The media and the industry infrastructure were trying to craft me into the person that they thought that I should be because I was a brown woman, I was rapping writing my own songs."
Teremoana Rapley currently works as a senior creative economy advisor for the New Zealand local government cultural and economic development agency, Auckland Unlimited. She is a stalwart of the music industry as an award winning singer songwriter. She stepped into the industry at the age of 14 with the politically conscious rap group Upper Hutt Posse and was inducted into New Zealand's Music Hall of Fame in 2018. She has worked in indigenous broadcasting for over two decades gaining over 3000 production credits as an executive producer and many production roles. Teremoana has worked in a community action and development space for the past 30 years with her latest co-created social change initiative focussing on intergenerational and intercultural place-based community building using the arts as the connector.
