Hapa

It Lives! [Feature]
Once left for dead, hapa haole music attracts new interest.

Kathryn Drury

August 13, 2003

     When I was a small girl, my favorite restaurant was the Aloha. Never mind that I lived in snowbound Rochester, NY — at the Aloha I was transported to the middle of the Pacific. The décor faux stream, plastic bamboo and sunset mural was like a child’s drink, a fizzy concoction that intoxicates solely through sugary sweetness. My mother and I sang along as someone warbled “Tiny Bubbles,” and I ate defrosted egg rolls. Glowing red by the light of the electric volcano, giant wooden gods grimaced as if in pain from the incredible tackiness of the whole affair.
     The Aloha is long gone, torn down sometime during the 1980s to make room for a Pizza Hut. But I’m glad I got to witness the last vestiges of a trend that seized America for nearly a century. Like the Aloha, hapa haole music recalls a place and a time that no longer exists, a place that in many ways never existed. Ironically, if the restaurant had stuck it out a few more years, it would today be considered trendy. Waikiki Wally’s, an East Village hideaway replete with plastic lei and stuffed monkeys, is packed with New York hipsters; in Honolulu, “the forbidden sounds” of Don Tiki are embraced by twentysomethings. Yet the resurgence of mid-century Hawaiiana offers us more than just a palm-tree shower curtain. Hapa haole music, once dismissed as bereft of substance, as inauthentic as a coconut-shell bra, is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Waikïkï. True, some hapa haole (“half foreign” or “half English”) can be vapid — “the night is young and so are we” — but it’s also a mother lode of material for musicians, historians, and pop culture enthusiasts.

Fall from grace
     Hapa haole fell out of favor in the 1970s, when the resurgence of Hawaiian culture and ethnic pride placed emphasis on learning the Hawaiian language, chants and the pre-missionary hula kahiko. As a result, “The young people don’t know hapa haole and look down on it,” explained Vicky Holt Takamine, kumu hula at Pua Ali‘i ‘Ilima hälau and a lecturer in dance ethnology at UH-Mänoa.
     Worried that the style would be lost, Takamine organized the first annual Hapa Haole Hula, Music and Film Festival, which took place last week. The inaugural festival included two lectures at the Honolulu Academy of Art, plus an evening of music at the Royal Hawaiian.
     Takamine is the co-founder of ‘Ilio‘ulaoakalani Coalition, a group of traditional practitioners committed to protecting Hawaiian customs; the president of KAHEA: The Hawaiian-Environmental Alliance, a coalition that works to preserve the natural and cultural environment; and co-founder and president of Aloha ‘Äinu, a new Hawaiian political party.
     Why would an activist like Takamine embrace a style of music and dance widely associated with a nonauthentic Hawaiian experience? “The hapa haole period served a real purpose,” she answered. “It kept Hawaiian culture alive. The festival is not just about entertainment; it’s education.”
     Hapa haole music allowed Hawaiians who were at that time discouraged from speaking their language, to express themselves through song, and to share those songs with a wide audience. It also helped keep hula alive as an art form, for although dancers did hapa haole numbers for tourists, many still knew the ancient style as well. Takamine’s kumu hula, Maiki Aiu Lake, performed in Waikïkï. “She danced in a black cellophane skirt and white gardenias, but she was totally respected.
     “I danced in Waikïkï in the 1960s and ’70s. Every hotel had a headline dancer, a showroom and Hawaiian music. That totally changed in the 1980s. I was really lucky to perform with some of these singers. We want to bring back these artists and songs.”
     “This aspect of Hawaiian culture deserves equal treatment,” agreed local author and Bishop Museum archivist DeSoto Brown. “It represents how Hawaiian culture adapted to, and grew from, the inevitable changes that occurred through contact with the outside world. Even if Hawai‘i had not been put under the control of the United Sates, American pop culture would have made its mark here just as it has everywhere else in the world.”
     He points out that the hapa haole genre is not exclusively the work of Caucasian or Mainland musicians. “We need to be aware of it, and to celebrate its deserving aspects while also being mindful of the elements that can be erroneous or even offensive.”

Island Fever
     The hapa haole era began in 1912, when a Broadway production, Bird of Paradise, featured a Hawai‘i-set storyline and Hawaiian music. Billed as a “spectacular dramatic novelty,” it featured a white man falling for a brown-skinned maiden, who later hurls herself into the volcano as a sacrifice. Something touched off in the Mainland zeitgeist, because by 1915, every Tin Pan Alley songwriter was scrambling to craft “Hawaiian” songs — some in English, some with Hawaiian words, even some with fake Pidgin (“wicky wacky woo”).
     Further fanning the flames of passion for all things island-related, the radio program Hawaii Calls (1935-1974) introduced hapa haole music to dinner tables and back porches all over the U.S. Like molten lava, hapa haole took the form of everything it came across; morphing into all styles of 20th-century music – ragtime, to jazz and blues, to rock, to the mod ’60s stylings of Don Ho and Kui Lee. The songs number in the thousands — a staggering amount considering that they generally cover the exact same subjects. Lyrics were often silly and dependent on pronunciations with puns, such as “I had to lova and leava on the lava,” or “Öhula like they do in Hahn-a-loo-la.”
     The most consistent hapa haole music-writing style is the romantic song, such as the evocative “Waikiki,” written by Andy Cummings in 1938, which used a poignant melody and lyrics conveying a sense of longing for home.
     The romantic songs can be poetic:
     “I hear the swish of rain as it sweeps down the valleys. I hear the song of wind as it sighs through the trees. I hear the crash of waves on the rocks and the beaches. I hear the hissing surf and the boom of the seas.”
     —from “Haole Hula,” by R. Alex Anderson.
     Anderson is one of the best-known writers of the era, along with Harry Owens, who penned the 1937 lullaby “Sweet Leilani,” which became Bing Crosby’s first gold record, snagged an Oscar, and sold so many copies that it helped pull the entire record industry out of the Depression.

The Ugly Side
     Some hapa haole tunes, however, veered into the shadowy areas of racism and sexism — even the infantilization of Hawaiian culture. (“I fell in love with a chocolate dove, while learning that funny, funny dance. This poor little kid, why she never did a bit of loving before.”) Or this ditty from 1957:
     “Mama’s mumu is drivin’ all the women coocoo, ’cause it’s the answer to a two-way girdle’s prayer. When you’re starving on a diet and you’d like to eat a horse, just take cover in a mumu and let nature take its course!”
     Lyrics of this ilk, made all the more undignified by the fact that many of the songwriters had never set foot farther west than Milwaukee, tarnished the image of hapa haole music.
     “I think that people don’t like it because it’s not respectful of our culture,” observed Takamine. “Songwriters haven’t always been fair about how they depict Hawai‘i. But there have been songs composed by people who love the islands and the people. Tin Pan Alley came up with some dumb songs, but you take the ones you like and use those.”
     “The more heartfelt pieces are probably the work of people who were actually in Hawaii, whether they were born here or just were here for a time,” comments Brown. “Whereas there were a whole lot of people on the Mainland who cranked out songs just because there was a fad for all things Hawaiian, and sometimes this stuff causes offense. But this is true of other genres as well.”

Selling Hawai‘i
     Along with the insatiable desire for Hawaiian music, there was also desire on the part of Americans for images of their fantasy island. The result was a glut of films, advertisements and art depicting Hawai‘i in ways both real and imagined. An avid collector of promotional materials, (such as travel brochures, film stills, menus from passenger liners Matsonia and Lurline, and postcards from the Kodak Hula Show), Brown gave a lecture on Hawai‘i’s fantasy image as part of the festival.
     “I started collecting when I was a teenager, in the late ’60s,” he said. “At first I was taken in by the fantasy and romantic appeal of the imagery, and kind of thought life had really been like that in the past. Of course I grew to realize that this wasn’t really the case, but there’s a lot to learn even from the phoniness, and why it had been created.”
     The vibrant ads for Dole pineapple and Pan American are examples of the visual counterparts to hapa haole music.
     Whether it’s tourist-related, such as a cruise ship or the visitor’s bureau, or a completely generic enterprise like Exxon, businesses have for decades perpetuated and profited from Hawai‘i’s image. Positioned as a faraway land of green waters and sun-drenched beaches yet American enough to have a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hawai‘i was, and still is, pitched as safely exotic.

Lovely hula hands
     The doe-eyed, tiny-waisted hula girl is the most common motif of the hapa haole era, used to represent the appealing qualities of the destination. In advertisements, hula performers are always shown as the object of attention of a well-dressed audience, attracting especially the male gaze.
     Hula dancers were also frequently depicted on calendars. In the 1920s and ’30s, it was dreamlike Art Nouveau style, à la Maxfield Parrish, but by the 1950s, the look was considerably more risqué. Odes to the pinup style seen in Esquire and the morale-boosting Varga Girl, these images are of bombshells wearing only strategically placed lei.
     “It’s primarily women,” says Takamine of the hula image during the hapa haole phase.
     Women have always been a major part of hula; the story goes that Hi‘iaka danced the first hula to appease her fiery sister, Pele. Still, most “hula dancers” shown in advertising weren’t authentic; they strike odd poses better suited to Arabian nights or “walk like an Egyptian” than käholo or ‘ami. One dancer, billed as “Princess Kalama,” although neither Hawaiian nor a princess, was photographed in lace-up high heels just swell for doing the can-can.

Faking it
     Clearly, authenticity is not the strong suit of the hapa haole era, but the same can be said about much of American life. Tom Cruise plays a samurai, Killian’s “Irish beer” is produced in Colorado, and whatever they’re serving at Olive Garden sure as hell isn’t Italian food. Still, American pop culture seems to be moving toward greater sensitivity to other cultures. At least James Bond’s Asian love interest is played by Michelle Yeoh instead of a Caucasian wearing inch-thick eyeliner.
     As for hula, Brown said, “No one on the Mainland in those years had any idea that such a thing as a kumu hula even existed, and even if they had known, they would not have cared. The only important things were, first, to dress attractive women in revealing costumes and second, to allow them to do some funny or sexy motions. Only since the Hawaiian renaissance of the ’70s has hula received widespread respect, and hula kahiko been studied so intensively.” Before that, Brown points out, there were hula “studios” where students may have learned some ancient-style hula, but mostly hapa haole songs.

Living legends
     The most ambitious event of the festival was an evening concert showcasing hapa haole music legends Beverly Noa, Nina Keali‘iwahamana, Mahi Beamer and Gary Aiko. Held in the Monarch Room of the Royal Hawaiian, the show also featured choral singers, contests for vocalists and dancers, and hapa haole hula.
     The night evoked the essence of Old Hawai‘i, a place where fantasy and reality are shaken together into a frothy concoction. Beverly Noa did her signature hula, “Lovely Hula Hands.” With her slim body and articulate, expressive hands, it’s hard to believe she’s old enough to have been Miss Hawai‘i 1952.
     With the balmy night and a mai tai in hand, if you squinted, you’d think it was 1930, 1950, 1960. Watching the audience, Nola Nahulu, artistic director of the a cappella vocal ensemble Kawaiolaonapukanileo, smiled and said, “Hapa haole was almost forgotten because it’s English words. But it’s part of our music, and if we’re going to celebrate everything else we should celebrate this too.”

Kathryn Drury writes for local and national publications on a range of topics and has been known to don the grass skirt herself from time to time.