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Label Spotlight: VT1S
Writer Hugo Hodge explores how Fiji's most exciting modern label helped replace the country's foreign music idols with homegrown talent.
The island nation of Fiji is best known for its postcard-perfect white-sand beaches and turquoise waters. It is a stereotypical image of the Pacific Island country, shaped by decades of tourism campaigns and travel shows. Those kinds of visual scenes are usually soundtracked by a reggae tune or traditional ukulele, but that’s also an increasingly passé representation of the music bubbling out of the country’s urban centres.
Island reggae was Fiji’s biggest musical export in the past, but today a new generation of innovators are releasing slick, modern productions, drawing on globally successful music styles. In bars and clubs in the capital Suva, you’re more likely to hear homegrown music that sounds like afrobeats from East Africa, amapiano from South Africa, or R&B from the United States. Despite their global outlook, these artists are motivated by an issue closer to home: the decline of their language among young people.
Singer-songwriter Kali Tui is a breakout talent on the VT1S (pronounced Vitty Ones) music label, part of a new wave of artists taking over Fiji’s airwaves and racking up millions of streams online. The singer’s breakout track ‘Nanumi Au’, about two lovers separating for reasons outside their control, is sung in the indigenous iTaukei language with an unmistakable, punchy amapiano beat accentuating the soaring vocals.
The capital Suva, is home to an active club community that descends on the city’s nightlife venues each weekend. Nowadays, when Kali Tui goes out, she hears DJs playing her own tunes. “When you go out, you still hear crowd favourites like Cyndi Lauper and Beyoncé, but since I joined the label, I was just hearing more VT1S,” Kali Tui says.
The person widely credited for charting this new course in Fijian music is producer George Wasile, aka Tropic Thunda. Along with co-founder Stee Vereakula, aka Serenation, the pair were inspired to start the new label after being unimpressed with the range of music on offer at the annual Fijian music awards. “What we saw there was a lot of boy bands doing reggae songs,” George says. “And we were like, what if we took this boy band and instead of reggae music we did a hip-hop or R&B track with Fijian lyrics?”
Tropic Thunda and Serenation spent a few years experimenting to work out the best formula for the label, which they officially launched in August 2022.
"In the beginning, it was just two friends experimenting and when a lot of people were happy with what we came up with, we just kept going,” Tropic Thunda says. "We do our research, and we listen to whatever sounds are trending, but when we create the songs, we add our own flavour to it."
The addition of traditional instruments to his productions, such as the lali drum, a traditional wooden slit drum carved from a single hollowed-out log, gives the songs a unique Fijian flair.
Since then, VT1S has become a consistent hitmaker, turning artists like Liz Vamarasi, Jay Tauleka and Kali Tui into stars. The label has grown a reputation for unearthing new talent and assembling the country’s best directors, choreographers, dancers and fashion designers to produce colourful music videos. The music videos showcase daily life in Fiji, which often differs from the highly saturated tourism campaigns. The formula is resonating with a wide audience at home, and on YouTube their songs gain millions of views, with comments from listeners all over the world.
Not only is the label ushering in a new golden era for Fijian music, it is also helping preserve the iTaukei language and reclaiming radio airtime for homegrown talent. The label’s manager, Tix Korocowiri, joined the team in 2022 after a career in local radio. He says Fijian music didn’t get much airtime in the past. “Unfortunately, as music programmers and directors at the time, we were never going to choose the local songs because they would never stack up next to Rihanna or Beyoncé,” Tix says.
Hearing VT1S for the first time was the ‘aha’ moment Tix had been waiting for his whole career. He describes himself as the label’s biggest fan because he gave up his radio job to join VT1S and help it grow. "I think the whole Fijian music industry was waiting for permission to be free and create, because everybody was sort of comfortable being the same and not trying to stand out,” he says. “We come from a very communal country where everybody is always afraid about what the next person will say and VT1S didn't give a shit.”
Previously, the music on the radio and at parties would typically be sung by English or African speakers, Tix says, but nowadays Fijians are hearing the musical styles they like in their own language. “We come from a colonised country, so a lot of our influences are coming from abroad and now that we're hearing a lot of our songs being played at parties where overseas songs used to play, it feels like we are reclaiming space,” he says.
“This exercise has been about replacing heroes,” Tix says.
The movement is gaining followers overseas and in unlikely places. In July, the group will head to the UK for the first time with dates in Cardiff, Liverpool and Edinburgh. Last year they went on an Australia and NZ tour with shows in Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland and elsewhere. Naturally, their overseas shows are readily attended by members of the Pasifika diaspora, and they have toured extensively through the Pacific Island region, but Tix has noticed an interesting new trend. “We're seeing a lot of white people from Australia and New Zealand coming out, so I'm not really sure how this is happening, but I think that's really encouraging for us to see that the music is spreading," he says.
The broad state of today’s music industry gives us plenty of reasons to feel uneasy about its future. The biggest story over the past year has been the proliferation of AI-generated music on streaming platforms and whether audiences will notice or even care. On social media, artists are expected to feed the insatiable demands of the attention economy. At times, it feels like the self-promotion business model is taking precedence over the creative process. Combined with a myriad of other problems like declining ticket sales, venue closures, corporatisation (to name a few), it’s enough to feel existential. Listening to music these days comes with a sense of listlessness about a simpler time.
The outlook is sunnier in Fiji. Their music industry has undergone an auspicious transformation, thanks in no small part to VT1S. "Before VT1S, there were not as many live shows or gigs,” Tropic Thunda says. “There were not many opportunities for artists to earn, but now, two or three years down the line, you have other labels forming.” The emergence of labels such as Resonance Entertainment, Wan Music, Ciwa Music, and Tunite demonstrates that a rising tide lifts all boats. Off-the-shelf distribution services like DistroKid have also helped Fijian artists reach overseas audiences and monetise their music.
Fiji’s population is under a million people, and the music industry is very small compared with neighbouring countries like Australia and New Zealand. But an underdeveloped industry holds enormous potential for growth. The proliferation of new opportunities is opening the door to young musicians who previously wouldn’t have considered pursuing such a career. Kali Tui was producing covers as a hobby while studying at university when a friend from her politics class connected her with VT1S. "It's a great time to be in music right now,” she says. “If you are talented in singing or even dancing, the art industry is really growing.” Collaborations with local fashion designers and dancers are also providing opportunities. "We have a big industry for fashion here in Fiji, and we're happy that we get to go hand in hand and work together for music videos and concerts," Kali Tui says.
Local press has lauded VT1S as "revolutionising” Fiji’s music industry, and it’s easy to see why. The raw creativity and enjoyment in the label’s music-making process and output are plain to see. There are also lessons to be gleaned from VT1S’s back-to-basics approach. "A lot of times people get ahead of themselves in the creative process,” Tix says. “They're always thinking, ‘Oh, I'm going to use this song for this purpose, I'm going to place it here and that might be true for the label executives. But for the artists here, we're really focused on just that creativity and going back to the basics of composing and the revolution comes through that whole process."
The label has come a long way from George’s original goal of introducing fresh global sounds into Fijian-language music. When the team realised young people were the primary audience listening to their catalogue, they realised they had created a tool to help preserve the iTaukei language. “All indigenous cultures around the world are going through this process right now where they're having to fight influences that are coming in from overseas," Tix says.
iTaukei is widely spoken in Fiji, alongside English and Hindi, but the quality of the language is under threat, and some dialects are endangered. Young people in urban areas tend to speak iTaukei with a more limited vocabulary than their parents. “A lot of us here in Suva, we don't speak iTaukei as our first language, we speak and think in English,” Tix says. On top of that, many Fijians move abroad for better opportunities, so their children grow up not learning how to speak the language.
Language preservation is a worthwhile mission, but it needs to be cool for young people to engage with it. African music has always been popular in Fiji because the drum patterns are similar to traditional Fijian ones, Tix says. “I think a reason why we scan trends globally is that if we try to push this whole thing about protecting language or creating a cultural movement in Fiji, it has to be popular, right?”
The fine line between appreciation and appropriation is highly nuanced and is often misunderstood. Cultural appropriation in music almost always involves a dominant culture repurposing the style and sounds of an often marginalised, underground scene. What is happening in Fiji, however, can be understood as a form of cultural reappropriation, in which Fijian artists are assigning new meaning to genres that were invented and popularised by African and African American communities, while also reclaiming their own language and culture that English colonisation attempted to wipe out. The result is something incredibly empowering for Fijian artists and audiences alike.
"Whatever we do, we try to remain authentic even though we are using hip-hop, R&B, and afrobeats,” Tix says. “When we’re coming up with lyrics, the writing team sits down, and we ask, 'How can we challenge how we use the language this week? We use old analogies, so we might start from an old Fijian saying or a sentence that we haven't heard in a long time, and we'll revive it using a theme that might be about love, or it might be about a party. I think at the heart of it, that's what it's all about."
The African influence is now helping to forge real-life connections on the continent. Kali Tui says she has received messages from fans in South Africa, and she has a new collaboration in the pipeline with Ugandan singer-songwriter Azawi, who has released hits that are popular in Fiji like ‘Slow Dancing’ and ‘Ten Over Ten’. “I'm really excited because it's a great opportunity for all of us,” Kali says. “It just takes one collab to kickstart it, and who knows who else on the label could collab with other African artists.”
What kind of genres Kali Tui will explore next remains to be seen, but that’s what keeps her excited. Her Sisi EP, produced by Tropic Thunda and Tix, took an R&B direction, and one of her latest singles, Galala, has disco-pop flavours. “I think that's the thing that I really love about VT1S, I get to do anything,” she says. “Like literally if I want to try out a heavy metal song, I can.” But not so fast, it does sound like there are some creative boundaries…
“No, we’ll never make a metal song,” Tropic Thunda says adamantly.
“Okay, maybe that’s the one thing he doesn’t know how to do,” Kali Tui admits.
