This week we have a special treat for you. Dr. Halifu Osumare was nice enough to write a post based on a chapter about Hawaiian hip-hop from her book, The Africanist Aesthetic In Global Hip-Hop:
They tell us that we’re equal. But if you look at history, we’re just another sequel
By virtue of Hawaii’s (colonial) history with the U.S. mainland and its unique geographic position as crossroads between East and West, the fiftieth state offers a particularly complex example of the globalization of hip-hop culture. Hawai`i floats geographically and culturally in the North Pacific, connecting Asia, Polynesia and Micronesia, and the Americas in historical and contemporary ways. Particularly as gateway to the Pacific Rim—the mid-way point between the United States mainland and Asia—Hawai`i is an interesting composite of Native Hawaiian, American, and Asian cultural factors.
Hawaii’s history and unique cultural mix connect it to the ways many youth articulate being on the margins of the mainstream through hip-hop. The double articulation of youth rebellion and that against the dominating haole (white) ruling class, which grew out of the business plutocracy that annexed the islands long before statehood, together form the basis of what I call hip-hop “connective marginality†in Hawai`i. Most youth, at some point, reflect a youth marginality that I explore in my book, The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (2007). To be sure, hip-hop youth culture on the Continental US and abroad has also foregrounded issues of rebellion against white dominant middle class culture. Hip-hop in places like Hawai`i is an example of multiple articulated marginalities of ethnicity, class, and historical oppression, as well as youth rebellion.
History of Hip-Hop in Honolulu
The City and County of Honolulu are situated on the relatively small island of O’ahu that is about fifteen hundred square miles. Honolulu, as the state’s economic and cultural center, is densely-populated with about 900,000 people representing 72% of the total state population. In these crowded conditions, like many mainland urban areas, hip-hop in Honolulu has had a checkered history. The Hollywood breakdance movies of the mid-eighties invaded the islands between 1982 and 1985, creating a proliferation of b-boys and an imitative style of hip-hop culture, not unlike many other global capital cities. Honolulu b-boying took place in Kapiolani Park at one end of Waikiki Beach, Bishop Square, the city’s banking and business center, and on Kalakaua Avenue, the main thoroughfare of the Waikiki tourist district.
Within these public spaces breakdance and hip-hop culture, as a trendy new mainland fad, flourished and quickly faded in the public’s imagination.
However, because of the enduring youth and general public attraction to hip-hop, b-boying, deejaying and rapping continued to have supportive venues in some nightclubs in Waikiki. Unlike clubs whose management catered to older, wealthier locals and tourists, these hip-hop clubs were usually under surveillance and were always under the threat of being closed by the police.
In most cases, rap music has been the main promoter of hip-hop culture in Hawai`i after the initial breakdance craze. Rap music from the US mainland has gotten increasing radio air time since 1994, with Honolulu’s I-94 and Xtreme Radio Hawaii programming entire shows with hip-hop’s mainland rhyme artists. In the late 90s, Eddie L. had a nightly hip-hop show on I-94 and Kool E. produced an overnighter show on KQMQ. Honolulu also benefited over the years from creative African American deejays such as DJ Sub Zero and emcees like Bismillah and Habib of a former Big Island-based rap group Reciprocated Chaos who worked the club circuit in Honolulu. Deejay Kutmaster Spaz (Derrick Kamohoali’i Bulatao) is a current hip-hop producer and deejay in Honolulu who started in the 80s as a b-boy and has developed into a full-time professional in Honolulu. To be a hip-hop deejay like Kutmaster Spaz, on the radio, in the clubs and at house parties, not only takes real commitment to the lifestyle, but is also an expensive business. But it is the smaller scene on the Big Island of Hawaii, where I lived for seven years, which I really want to explore.
Hip-hop, Big Island Style:
Local Hawaiians and African Americans in “Dialogueâ€
Hilo is the seat of government on the windward side of the island of Hawai`i, more popularly called the Big Island. With a population of about 46,000 people, Hilo has managed to maintain a small old town atmosphere. In the late 90s, Along Kanoelehua Highway in a small Hilo shopping center, there was a business called the Wreck Shop, a clothing outlet with a hip-hop orientation. It was the first visual sign that hip-hop culture had permeated even the Big Island. The Wreck Shop occupied the end storefront of a small shopping complex that also contained several old, well established local businesses. The Wreck Shop sports a neon sign in electric new wave lettering and carries all of the latest hip-hop gear. Its shop owner, Malu (Ethan Motte) imported the hottest fashions from New York and Los Angeles: Fubu athletics shoes, PBN sweat shirts, Joker jeans and Karl Kani sport jerseys with huge Michael Jordan #23’s emblazoned on the front. The Wreck Shop is indicative of hip-hop youth culture that has expanded into contemporary island life, nestling even into small towns like Hilo.
By the end of the 90s, the Big Island hip-hop scene had grown to support not only its own clothing store, but also to sustain occasional local outdoor rap events. Coconut Island, located at picturesque Hilo Bay and connected by a small foot bridge, was the site of several major hip-hop concerts such as the touring Geto Boys and Vanilla Ice in the early 1990s. The Big Island hip-hop scene had grown to the point of being able to occasionally sustain local outdoor hip-hop events on Coconut Island that are sponsored by organized groups of b-boys, aerosol artists, deejays and emcees like Them True Headz and the Dynamic Funk Crew. Even on the Big Island, where a small town of Hilo’s size is called “the city,†hip-hop youth culture has invaded.
Hawaiians & African Americans: The Dialogue of Place and Displacement
So what are the links historically and politically between native Hawaiian and African Americas that would cause connective marginality among hip-hop heads? African American political and cultural displacement can be perceived at any point along the long journey from the centuries of Atlantic slave trading to the Great Migrations of millions of marginalized black citizens who left the American South for the “promised land†of the North. This entire trajectory of displacement eventually spawned the 1950s Civil Rights movement and the 1960s Black Power and Black Arts Movements. In turn, these epoch-making American social forces helped to define other cultures’ struggles. In Hawai`i, the 1970s’ aloha aina (love of the land) protest movement was initiated by evictions of Native Hawaiians and local people from lands long used in traditional ways. It is, therefore, the specific land issues for Native Hawaiians and locals reared in Hawai`i that prompts Hawaiian Studies Scholar Haunani-Kay Trask to analyze that “[m]ore akin to the American Indian Movement than to the black Civil Rights Movement, the Hawaiian Movement began as a battle for land rights but would evolve, by 1980, into a larger struggle for native Hawaiian autonomy.â€
Sudden Rush, Hawaiian Rap Group
mp3: “True Hawaiian”
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Sudden Rush, Hawaii’s most developed rap group, grasp these historic bonds of oppression and allude to them within their strong pro-sovereignty rap messages. This Big Island-based group of emcees premiered their second CD, Ku’e!! (to oppose, resist: stand different) in 1997. Situating their artistic approach within a Hawaiian context rather than an appropriated imitation of mainland style, the compilation of strongly-political jams was an important step, content-wise, in the hip-hop movement in the islands. On track one, “True Hawaiian,†they position the political hegemony of the haole plutocracy in the Pacific that eventually led to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy as a part of the last five hundred years of general displacement of people of color:
They tell us that we’re equal
But if you look at history, we’re just another sequel
Started with America, built from desecration
They called the Indians savages and threw ‘em on reservations
Then they took the African man from the motherland
To this other land to work for the master’s plan
That wasn’t enough
They had to cross the big blue
And they saw Hawai`i, oh yeah, they took that too
They saw the hula and called it paganistic
But they didn’t think twice when they were raping the Pacific
Historical oppression of the Indian, African, and Hawaiian are clearly juxtaposed as a part of the same “progress†ethos of European imperialism.
Ku’e!!’s cover images are unambiguously symbolic of what their music is about: Sudden Rush’s members, Don Ke’ala Kawa’auhau (Da Rappa Nui), Shane Vincent (Da Watterman), and Caleb Richards (Da Reddeye), are pictured struggling to push a Hawaiian flag upright on a Big Island Pacific shoreline, as Mauna Kea, one of the two Big Island mountains as iconic island image, looms majestically in the background (see illustration). Along side this image is a reprint of a 1893 Honolulu newspaper article entitled “Here to Stay!†The article, accompanied by a photo of Queen Liliu’okalani, is her proclamation of Hawaiian tenacity in face of her illegal overthrow and house arrest in Iolani Palace, the official residence of the former Hawaiian monarchs in Honolulu. The message is clear: the usurping of Hawaiian lands was a part of a violent grand plan of Manifest Destiny, and they want it back.
Sudden Rush, Way Out West Enterprises, 1997
Sudden Rush represents the best of the Hawaiian-African American dialogue in the hip-hop scene in Hawai`i with their use of black style and the Hawaiian language. When I questioned Ke’ala about Sudden Rush’s place in the sovereignty movement, it became obvious that he views their music role as cultural workers: “we need the hardcore sovereignty people who speak of a separate state, but we need the compromising side too. We are not politicians, but we believe in the Hawaiian voice, and our rap music can help bring the message.†Their resonance with historical oppression, as one of the social foundations of rap content, serves them in their own political struggle in the Hawaiian Islands.
Conclusions
Hawaii’s local culture has always been “sampled†with global economics and the influx of US popular culture in the hip-hop era. This dynamic has existed for the last one hundred and twenty five years at various stages of industrialization, technology, and US mainland control of Hawai`i. Hip-hop culture and rap music are therefore the latest in a long history of cross-cultural music and dance in the islands that have reflected fantasies about the “island paradise,†as well as the islands’ own fantasies about the dominating Continental US. The globally circulating youth culture of hip-hop today is having varying effects in the urban capital Honolulu, as well as in rural areas on the neighbor islands, such as Hilo and Pahoa on the Big Island.
