Honolulu Advertiser Covers IZ Book

Honolulu showbiz eminence grise Wayne Harada mentioned my IZ book in the Advertiser last week, quoting a press release that I think came out from the Mountain Apple Company, IZ's record label.

...with New York-based writer Dan Kois (a former Honolulu resident who has contributed to The Advertiser and Honolulu magazine) zooming in on the late Island entertainer's "Rainbow" connection, thanks to "Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World."

Well, I do hope the book will zoom in on a lot more, but I'm grateful for the mention. Thanks, Wayne!

The Sanjaya of His Era

Don Ho, who died of heart failure Saturday at 76, was inarguably a terrific entertainer. In many ways, he was his era's Sanjaya: a crooner, a showman, a lover boy. Like the ponyhawked American Idol contestant, he could connect directly with an audience, whether on TV or live; like Sanjaya, he also represented to mainstream America the harmless exotic, the "other" who was safe to admire from a distance. Ho's long and happy career should serve as warning to those who dismiss Sanjaya as a flash in the pan whose fifteen minutes are about to run out. (It's not hard to imagine a 76-year-old Sanjaya playing to packed houses in Vegas, as Ho did in Waikiki; all he needs to find is his signature song.)

For his whole career, Ho represented a certain image of Hawai'i: the islands as vacation mecca for haoles from the mainland, a kitschy paradise of co-eds, beach boys, and tiny bubbles. Despite his outdated act, and despite the fact that few locals attended his Thursday-night shows at the Waikiki Beachcomber, he's being canonized in Hawai'i today. The flood-the-zone coverage in his hometown paper reflects the state's love for any native son, no matter how little he has to do with everyday Hawaiians, and no matter how skilled he actually is. (I still remember the 2000 World Series, in which local boy Benny Agbayani was the lead story in the Honolulu papers, not the Mets or the Yankees or even the games themselves. AGBAYANI HITS DOUBLE, the headlines would scream, and then in tiny type underneath: "Mets Lose 6-5.")

Ho began and ended every concert with his signature tune, "Tiny Bubbles" -- a song he professed to hate but nevertheless played twice, once early for the audience members who had to go to bed, and once late for the audience members who wouldn't remember he sang it the first time. I prefer to remember him for his jaw-dropping 2002 cover of Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey." It's not that good, but he sure sounds like he's having a great time singing it. Me ke aloha pumehana, Don Ho.

Facing Future

Much to my surprise, my book proposal for Continuum's 33 1/3 series has been accepted, and I'll be writing a book for them to be published sometime in late 2008. My book is about Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's 1993 album Facing Future.





The entire list of accepted submissions is pretty impressive. For instance, my own book isn't even close to being the one I'm most excited about reading. That book is, naturally, the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle writing about Black Fucking Sabbath.

Here's an excerpt from my book proposal:

When he died on June 26, 1997, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole weighed almost 800 pounds. He'd just won the Nā Hōkū Hawaiian music awards for Entertainer of the Year and Album of the Year, and had watched the ceremony from his Honolulu hospital room. After IZ's death, from respiratory failure, the flags on state government buildings flew at half-staff and 20,000 people a day came to view his body, lying in state in the state capitol building. (He was the first non-politician in Hawaiian history to be afforded this honor.)

He was without a doubt the most popular and beloved singer in Hawai'i. His popularity stemmed not only from his music but from his outspokenness on issues of native Hawaiian sovereignty. IZ's transformation from feckless, apolitical youth to politically engaged maturity is a familiar story, but his engaging personality -- plus his almost-literally larger-than-life stature -- made IZ a folk hero in a state struggling like no other with the weight and responsibility of its native heritage.

In that light, Facing Future represents, to most locals and especially to Native Hawaiians, the shining apex of a brilliant career and a crucial artifact of local culture. It's an everyday treasure, an album everyone owns and plays constantly, and two versions of "Hawai'i '78" -- a song first popularized by IZ's brother in the group they formed together, the Makaha Sons of Ni'ihau -- bookend the album. Over a lush wash of ukulele, synthesized strings and throbbing drums, IZ bemoans what the old kings and queens of Hawai'i would think if they saw what their great land has become in these modern times.

But to fans outside Hawai'i, "Hawai'i '78" isn't the album's standout track; for most, it's IZ's delicate cover medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World." His unique vocals, applied to a pair of deeply familiar songs, have made the track a licensing bonanza for IZ's label, Mountain Apple Records; the tune has appeared in ads (for eToys and Sony), films (50 First Dates, Finding Forrester and Snakes on a Plane) and TV shows (like Anthony Edwards' final episode of "ER"). That's how most Mainlanders first became acquainted with IZ, and it's that track that has made Facing Future the most commercially successful Hawaiian album ever.

I would guess that most Mainlanders who own Facing Future don't own many other "world music" albums, and I'd guess most listen to very little on the record other than "Over the Rainbow." "Hawai'i '78," to these listeners, is one of a series of nice but unfamiliar songs that exist mostly to be skipped over when they come up on an iPod's random play. To Mainlanders, the album is something of a curio, or kitsch -- a touch of the unthreatening unfamiliar in an otherwise staid record collection.

That disparity -- between a curio and a treasure -- is the starting point for my book for 33 1/3.

So the future that I'm facing is an awful lot of research, writing and editing, though it certainly doesn't hurt that some of that research will happen in Hawai'i. My book is something of an anomaly on the list of accepted proposals -- at the very least, it's certainly the one book among 21 whose title will make a lot of readers say, "Huh?" I'm very pleased and excited that the editors of the series have decided to take a chance on my idea.