Storm blowing from paradise: social protest and oppositional ideology in popular Hawaiian music

Extract

In the early 1970s, in the American Island State of Hawaii, popular music began a transformation that was, to some extent, similar in form to what occurred on the American mainland ten to fifteen years earlier, when popular music first merged with the civil rights movement and then with the anti-Vietnam movement. Hawaiian popular musicians, reacting to the commercially slick music of the tourist trade and the Wai Ki Ki nightclubs, reached back to embrace the few ethnic artists still alive and performing. They searched their island past for traditional material and, as the movement consolidated, merged this material with their own pressing social and cultural concerns to create a new type of music – part contemporary, part traditional and all wrapped in a cloak of strong social protest against non-native Hawaiians who they saw as having nearly totally destroyed their culture, their selfidentity, their pride and their sacred land. As Haunai-Kay Trask (1982, p. C2), a spokesperson for the movement, put it:

Any society that has experienced the kind of impact the Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian people have experienced wind up being on the bottom because they are inundated with another culture … High rises, fancy clothes, and freeways – that's what United States culture stands for. It's grotesque. They have no feeling for the fragility of life. Or flora or fauna. Part of me hates the haoles with a passion, but part of me doesn't care. They're just stupid and I want them to stay away.