Felix Desmarais: I don't like Six60 or New Zealand. Let me explain.

'Don't Forget Your Roots' - it gets me every time, and I resent it, writes Felix Desmarais. Photo / NZME

Opinion

OPINION:

"I don't like Six60," I said to an aghast group of New Zealanders.

I felt the need to explain myself.

It was ahead of the Six60 show in Rotorua last week - which, whether you like Six60 or not, is a great sign of our shift away from the retracted events scene of the past three years.

"Well, I do like one song, but it annoys me because it always makes me cry. So I don't like it."

My friends laughed at me. At, not with.

'Don't Forget Your Roots' - it gets me every time, and I resent it.

It's even worse when it's the te reo version, Kia Mau Ki Tō Ūkaipō. Bawling.

Put either on my car stereo when I'm driving through the luscious green countryside of the Bay of Plenty or Waikato, and I'm a blubbering patriotic mess.

I don't like it because I don't consider myself particularly patriotic.

I like New Zealand, but I don't want to get all misty-eyed just because I happened to be born here. It seems a bit arbitrary, like the random fact of where you were when you took you first breath then means it's the best place in the world. Strikes me as a bit narcissistic.

I went on a short-term exchange to the US when I was 16, which included a week in a high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was more of a culture shock than I expected, not least at the beginning of every day when the kids stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

I knew about it, and that it's done in most US schools, but seeing it in person was quite bizarre. It felt cultish and foreign.

I was told I could participate if I wanted to, which also seemed a bit strange to me, to pledge allegiance to a place I'd otherwise had nothing to do with (though curiously an ancestry site did once appear to suggest I'm directly descended from someone who signed the Declaration of Independence. Citation needed.)

I screwed my nose up to participating, meanwhile going home from America meant back to my Australian high school where I quite happily sang along with Advance Australia Fair at school assemblies. Go figure.

Perhaps it was because of my cross-Tasman upbringing that I now feel ambivalent about patriotism since I'm never really sure where I'm from.

"What about the song Pepeha?", one friend asked, as though it's physically impossible not to like that song if you're a Kiwi.

"Nah," I said, teeing it up on my phone to remind myself how it went.

"Ko mana tōku maunga ..." warbled Matiu Walters.

I felt a prick in the corner of my eyeball.

"Okay, fine, if this was playing in my headphones while I was in a plane returning to New Zealand from another country, it would destroy me."

It's funny how our visions of ourselves can often so vastly diverge from the reality.

I have a bad habit of rejecting anything, in the first instance, that is widely loved. Something deep in my lizard brain always wants to eschew anything that is popular.

It happened with Harry Potter, social media and - as we learned last week - Hokey Pokey. If it's recommended, I'm not touching it. Until I do, and then I love it (but not bloody Hokey Pokey).

So I'm going to have to accept and admit it this time.

The truth is Don't Forget Your Roots makes me bawl like a baby and deeply reconnects me with my country of birth. My home.

I love Six60, and I love New Zealand. Just don't tell anyone.

• Felix Desmarais is a journalist and mostly-former stand-up comedian.