Popularity
The song is very popular in New Zealand and is sometimes called the country's unofficial national anthem, although it has been adapted to commercial advertising and by sporting groups. Notable examples include:
- "Sailing Away", which promoted New Zealand's 1987 America's Cup challenge, and featured an ensemble choir of famous New Zealanders recording as 'All Of Us',
- It is best known worldwide through Air New Zealand's TV advertisements in 2000. This version was performed by Rose Hanify (later of NZ Band Supermodel). In particular, the song became a phenomenon in Australia during the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, where the song again became another unofficial anthem, this time for the success of Oceania into the new millennium, specificially during the time of the Olympic Games, and beyond.
In April 2009 the Israeli composer Rami Bar-Niv wrote a piano piece based on the song - "Pokarekare Variations". He wrote it upon a suggestion of a NZ friend from Rotorua and as a new piece to mark his 5th concert tour of NZ in Sept 2009.
A schoolyard parody, "O curry curry arna, I found a squashed banana", is well known to New Zealand school-children, and was being sung in Melbourne playgrounds from the early-1960s to the mid-1970s.
The tune of "Pokarekare Ana" has been borrowed for an Irish hymn to the Blessed Virgin: "A Mhuire Mháthair, sé seo mo ghuí".
Pokarekare Ana was also sung at the opening of the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung by Hayley Westenra and Russell Watson.
Read more about this topic: Pokarekare Ana
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)