Fluxblog Interview With Dan Kois!

Dan Kois is a contributing writer for New York Magazine and a film critic for the Washington Post, and has written for a variety of other top-shelf publications. His first book is Facing Future, a volume in the 33⅓ series about the life and music of the late Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, the most iconic artist in the history of Hawaiian music. It’s a terrific book that explores Iz’s fascinating life story as well as issues of Hawaiian cultural identity, the mainstream crossover of niche music, and the spread of music through word of mouth and licensing. This conversation with Dan touches on all of that and more. Enjoy.

Matthew Perpetua: Even though Facing Future has sold over 2 million copies in the US, it’s still probably the most unlikely album to be featured in the 33⅓ series. When you decided to pitch the book, did you think of it as a longshot, as it isn’t exactly in their wheelhouse?

Dan Kois: Yes, it seemed like a bit of a long shot. I felt I had on my side two things: 1. There is a pretty fascinating, and untold, story here; 2. Hawaiians and tourists love buying things about Hawai’i. So I tried to make those points very clearly in my proposal, to inspire their confidence both in the quality and the saleability of the book. The 33⅓ I have always compared it to — even though there is almost zero overlap in their audiences — is the one on Neutral Milk Hotel. Which is to say, an album came out of nowhere, and then the artist disappeared in the pre-internet era. Mangum by choice, Iz not at all.

Matthew Perpetua: Both of those records thrive on reputation, and being passed around like “secrets”.

Dan Kois: Right, and their reputation and popularity have grown faster than the available information about them. So there is a gap. If you want to know about Neutral Milk Hotel, the best source is the 33⅓ book. I hoped mine would serve the same purpose for people curious about Iz.

Matthew Perpetua: In terms of the books being useful, it makes more sense than to cover records that have been written about ad nauseum.

Dan Kois: Yeah. Unless you have a really fascinating take or really amazing access, for example, it is tough to find something new to say about the Beatles.

Matthew Perpetua: Had you been wanting to tell the story of Iz for a while, or was this an idea that came out of brainstorming for a proposal?

Dan Kois: It came completely from brainstorming a 33⅓ proposal. I was interested in his story, and more broadly interested in stories of Hawaiian cultural heroes. At one point I wanted to write a book about the Native Hawaiian surf martyr Eddie Aikau, until I met a dude named Stuart Coleman who was already writing one, which was then published and was quite good. But I had always found the album more interesting as a story than I found it amazing as an album, and loved the idea of digging deeper into his life. Also, I loved the idea of going to Hawai’i to research it.

Matthew Perpetua: I’m a little unclear on your relationship with Hawai’i — you lived there for a while?

Dan Kois: I lived there for a year, right after grad school. My wife worked as a clerk for a federal judge, and I telecommuted to a company on the East Coast, which meant that, thanks to the time difference, after noon no one was paying attention to whether I was in my office or not. As long as I got my work done, I could do it anywhere, so I spent a lot of afternoons reading manuscripts on the beach. I really came to love the culture — not just the ancient Hawaiian culture, which is of course fascinating, but also the pop culture of Hawai’i, which is just as junky and lovable as pop culture anywhere but non-homogenous in the way that most pop culture isn’t. Everyone in Hawai’i listened to “Because I Got High” — it was 2001 — but they also listened to tons of local, semi-crappy, semi-inspired pop music.

Matthew Perpetua: Was this before or after you discovered Iz?

Dan Kois: I found Iz just before we left for Hawai’i, thanks to one of his many serendipitous press hits — a feature in the Washington Post which ran just as we were preparing to move.

Matthew Perpetua: You say early on in the book that Hawai’i is like a foreign country, though it’s part of the United States.

Dan Kois: Yeah, that’s the way it feels. It’s even reflected in Iz’s record-store placement, in “World” music.

Matthew Perpetua: How much of an American cultural identity exists in Hawai’i, and how does it mix with Hawaiian cultural identity? It seems like that was the primary tension in Iz’s life and art, trying to reconcile the two, or rejecting American culture in favor of traditional Hawaiian culture.

Dan Kois: They mix really fluidly. A Honolulu musicologist I spoke to described Hawaiian culture as a “magpie culture”; locals pick and choose that from the dominant American culture that interests them and leave aside the rest. And so country music, for example, is basically non-existent in Hawai’i, but whole radio stations are devoted to locally-recorded reggae. As far as Iz’s life goes, it was indeed the tension in his career before his death, and continues to be after. He wanted to remain “authentic” to the fans and friends for whom he was an icon of Native Hawaiianness, while also feeling strong urges — both emotional and financial — to broaden his audience base as much as possible. Which by definition means becoming “less Hawaiian.”

Matthew Perpetua: True. But as you say, if Hawai’i is now a magpie culture, it makes a lot of sense that an eclectic grab-bag like Facing Future would become the culture’s most iconic album. It seems like whether it was intentional or not, Iz made something that represented several different ideas about what Hawaiian music was and could be.

Dan Kois: Right. Everyone is able to hear something they love in it, whether in the songs that are strongly Hawaiian or strongly Mainland-inspired. Or in between! It’s a four-quadrant hit, if the quadrants are Old Locals, Young Locals, Mainland Journalists, and Soccer Moms.

Matthew Perpetua: The song Iz is best known for outside of Hawai’i is his cover medley of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” and “What A Wonderful World”, which has mainly spread via extensive licensing. Most people know nothing about Iz, but have definitely heard that recording. How did that happen?

Dan Kois: Iz’s label, Mountain Apple, has always been a very aggressive licensor of his music — with his enthusiastic participation, before he died. They were aware that the record was never going to break on the radio, so they used TV/movies/ads as their radio. Remember that part of High Fidelity the movie where they play the Beta Band in the record store and someone immediately buys the record? Mountain Apple took advantage of the fact that “Rainbow” is that kind of song — one that most people, upon hearing, immediately want to know more about. And so one exposure was often all it took to get people interested in it.

Matthew Perpetua: What got the ball rolling with all that? Who was the first to really jump on “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” as the breakout track?

Dan Kois: The first huge placement was an ad for eToys. So many people were calling eToys’ 800 number — BECAUSE THEY HAD ONE! — that they just put up a separate page on their website saying “Wondering what that song was?”

Matthew Perpetua: Do you know if eToys came to them, or if they were shopping the record around?

Dan Kois: I don’t get the impression they were shopping it around — they didn’t have the wherewithal to do it. Nearly every hit has been people coming to them, because they heard the song in another ad, or in a friend’s house, or, as is the case for two separate movie placements, because they were rich movie producers on vacation in Maui who heard it in Borders. They also got a huge hit on NPR in the late ’90s. Its placement on ER during the episode where (SPOILER FROM 2002!) Mark Greene dies. That was the biggest hit of all.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, that’s where I first heard it, for sure.

Matthew Perpetua: At this point, the song has spread around organically through enthusiastic fans and through this extensive licensing, it’s gone from cherished cult hit to something kind of cliched. Last night I went to an improv show at the UCB Theater and this one Harold group called Badman actually did a recurring riff on Iz’s version of the song because the suggested word at the start was ‘ukulele. Do you think the song has changed a lot, in terms of what it means to people?

Dan Kois: Yes, its meaning has transformed. Many Mainland fans viewed it as their own personal treasure — something only they knew about, and which they gave to others as a gift. But it’s hard to maintain that feeling about a song when it’s playing at the sea kayak-rental place in Rehoboth.

Matthew Perpetua: The one girl in the Harold group was joking about it being a wedding cliche, and how everyone thinks it’s special and unique.

Dan Kois: Yes! Someone described it to me as “That song you heard at your last four rehearsal dinners.” Whereas in Hawai’i, the song has gone from being an afterthought — a song on the record that not that many people talked about, and one he never performed live — to an all-purpose signifier of nostalgia. A Honolulu DJ told me it’s the song he always plays on Senior Night, because it makes everyone go, “Awwwww.” That’s all wrapped up, of course, in the islands’ feelings about Iz himself.

Matthew Perpetua: He’d been famous on the island for quite a while for his previous band.

Dan Kois: Right — he was, if not the biggest star in Hawaiian music, among the biggest since the mid-’70s, thanks to his band the Makaha Sons of Ni’ihau. I hadn’t really listened to them before researching the book, and now I would much rather listen to a Makaha Sons album than to Facing Future.

Makaha Sons of Ni’ihau “Pakalolo”

Matthew Perpetua: Why is that?

Dan Kois: Well, part of it is overlistening to Facing Future to write the book. But also, I find their music incredibly sunny and appealing, and none of their albums are plagued by duds — songs like the Jawaiian tracks on Facing Future that sound, to my Mainland ears, inauthentic and lame. But of course “authenticity” is a pretty charged (and functionally useless) concept.

Matthew Perpetua: Is the Jawaiian (Hawaiian reggae) thing still going strong, or was that more of an early ’90s trend?

Dan Kois: No, it’s still alive and well in Hawaiian music. It sounds less crappy now — either they’re using more live bands in the studio, or the sequencers are just better — but it’s still a dominant strain in Hawaiian pop. It’s pretty roundly hated among Hawaiian music traditionalists.

Matthew Perpetua: Now that the internet has made it easier for music to spread around beyond geographic regions, why hasn’t more non-Iz Hawaiian music made more waves in Mainland culture? I imagine a lot of it is isolation and indifference among most music writers, but is there something else at play here?

Dan Kois: That’s a good question! And one that plagues every Hawaiian musician hoping to make it big, Iz-style.

Matthew Perpetua: Right, in the book you mention there is some resentment towards the Mountain Apple Company for prioritizing the marketing of this long-dead, hugely successful artist at the expense of living artists on their roster.

Dan Kois: Yes, I heard that from a number of people, including artists on the Mountain Apple label. And of course they are going to do the most with Iz that they possibly can — he’s an undeniably important artist, and also a money-printing machine. But I also think that the internet, while accelerating Iz’s crossover, might also hamper the traditional connection that might have been made in Olden Times, when record stores existed. That is, if you hear Iz’s song, and download it off Napster or BitTorrent or wherever, there’s nothing specifically Hawaiian about it to you. It exists independent of all other Hawaiian music – it’s not sitting next to a Gabby Pahinui record in the World section. And I think many people do seek out other Hawaiian music, but how much? Three records? Well, good news: Thanks to Mountain Apple, there are three other Iz records you could buy right now. That said, Iz’s status as the only mega-successful Hawaiian artist is not so different than, say, Buena Vista Social Club’s status as the only mega-successful Afro-Cuban traditional ensemble.

Matthew Perpetua: Right. This is part of how the “world music” market works. It’s this process of well-meaning tokenism.

Dan Kois: I will say that Iz’s success has spurred what one local paper referred to as a “cover glut” in Hawaiian music. Everyone is trying to record the next “Over the Rainbow.”

Matthew Perpetua: What is the most shameless stuff you’ve heard in that vein?

Dan Kois: I am not a big fan of Hawaiian covers of songs that weren’t even that good to start with — “Put a Little Love in Your Heart,” for example. Also, Hawaiian artists need to cut it out with “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

Matthew Perpetua: Something I found interesting about Iz was that, in terms of his fame and status on the island, his morbid obesity was a boon and not so much this immediate career-killer.

Dan Kois: Yeah. There’s a long tradition in Native Hawaiian culture of important people holding their mana — their power — in largeness. And part of Iz’s appeal on the islands was that he was such an ordinary, everyday bruddah — and being huge just accentuated that.

Matthew Perpetua: Right, because obesity rates are so high among native Hawaiians.

Dan Kois: Far higher than among non-Native Hawaiians.

Matthew Perpetua: The only obvious parallel around this time in Mainland culture I can think of is Biggie Smalls, maybe some other lesser fat rapper guys.

Dan Kois: …also famous for his posthumous output! Yeah, his fame only accelerated his morbid obesity — the more popular he got, the more his friends and fans treated him like a king. Which meant that even when he was in the hospital after a heart attack dudes were sneaking him char siu pork.

Matthew Perpetua: I was kinda amazed by the degree to which people let Iz do whatever he wanted. He ran rampant with food and drugs, he showed up to sessions and gigs whenever. How did that happen?

Dan Kois: He was hugely talented, he was hugely popular, he was at heart a nice guy — people let him get away with a lot. Part of what is amazing about Facing Future, the album, is the degree to which he managed to rein in his life long enough to make it.

Matthew Perpetua: It seemed like a lot of the people he worked were operating with him with the realization that with his health being so poor, they were working on borrowed time. Did Iz have that sort of sense himself?

Dan Kois: Yeah. He certainly knew that. By the time he was recording Facing Future he had already survived a late-20s heart attack. His brother and sister had identical heart attacks, and did not survive.

Matthew Perpetua: His brother Skippy’s death had a pretty huge impact on him, right? There’s that dialogue about him on the intro version of “Hawai’i ’78”.

Dan Kois: One of the reasons there are two versions of “Hawai’i ’78” on the record is because Iz’s lawyer wanted to ensure that Iz owned the master of him singing the complete song — at the time his signature song, but only previously recorded with the Makaha Sons. Israel’s big brother Skippy founded the Makaha Sons with him and led the band until his death in the early 1980s. At the time of his death, Israel and Skippy were fighting, and Skippy had just skipped Israel’s wedding. From the quotes on the song, and other things he said, it seems as though he was haunted by the death — when he straightened his life out, a lot of people noticed that he seemed to be trying to model himself on Skippy. He became more responsible, more attentive to business issues, and in fact a much more vocal proponent for Native Hawaiian sovereignty — which had previously been Skippy’s issue, not Iz’s.

Matthew Perpetua: What is the Hawaiian sovereignty movement like these days?

Dan Kois: I would say that it is a little less fiery than it was at its peak in the 1970s, but that is also because Native Hawaiian rights are a part of the fabric of everyday life in Hawai’i in a way they weren’t then. The Apology Bill of ’93 was a big deal to many activists, but hasn’t addressed a lot of the underlying issues.

Matthew Perpetua: It’s funny to ask a question like that as a reasonably informed American, by the way. It really does seem like Hawai’i is this other country when you think about how invisible it is to Mainland culture. It doesn’t seem to come up too often in national news, and culturally we mostly just think of it as a big resort town.

Dan Kois: Yes! How can none of us know like any of this? Apparently Sarah Vowell is working on a big book about 19th century Hawaii, so maybe everyone will finally pay attention. The election of Barack Obama has been a pretty amazing thing for Hawai’i — in that it has focused attention on the state’s overwhelming civic spirit of pretty enthusiastic multiculturalism. Hawaiians are going crazy. I mean, I lived there during the Subway Series, Mets vs. Yankees, but in Hawai’i that was strictly the Benny Agbayani Series. Like, headlines on newspapers would read AGBAYANI HITS DOUBLE, and then in smaller type below that, METS LOSE. So you can imagine how excited they are about a local made President.

Matthew Perpetua: Ha, true. It’s that local boy makes good thing on the ultimate level.

Dan Kois: And it relates to Iz too. There’s an interesting tension in Hawai’i between the pride that Hawaiians feel when a local boy makes good, and the sanctity of Native Hawaiian tradition, which some fans feel is being watered down by his ubiquity.

Matthew Perpetua: Do some people get upset that this guy who made a lot of serious politically-minded music about Hawaiian culture often gets reduced to sentimental kitsch? I mean, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” and “What A Wonderful World” were already standards with their own particular cultural baggage, and that recording is mostly just a Hawaiian gloss on something everyone already knows. So it’s really not much about him or about Hawai’i as it’s some vague notion of Hawai’i, and perhaps earlier on, a notion of “authenticity.”

Dan Kois: Yes. Not everyone. Not even most Hawaiians. But some certainly feel as though an artist who is important to their culture is becoming a guy who gets covered on American Idol. What rubbed me the wrong way was the soft-pedaling that Israel’s politics get from his label — a necessary evil, many might argue, in order to make him palatable to Mainland audiences. It’s one thing to license Iz’s work. That’s the business, and anyways all signs suggest he was in favor of that. But the guy recorded protest songs and put the Hawaiian flag on his album covers and wanted to keep Hawai’i for the Hawaiians — so to say, as the president of Iz’s label has said, that he didn’t have any particular political leanings, seems pretty lame.

Israel Kamakawiwo’ole “Hawai’i ’78”

Matthew Perpetua: Speaking of this, my favorite song on Facing Future is the regular version of “Hawai’i ’78”. That’s a pretty solemn song.

Dan Kois: Yeah. It’s a pretty amazing ballad.

Matthew Perpetua: Have you heard the Pearl Jam version? I found it on YouTube, they performed it in Honolulu a few years ago.

Dan Kois: Yeah. I really liked that — it was a more thoughtful cover than what I would expect from a Mainland band.

Matthew Perpetua: I’m pretty sure that Eddie Vedder lives in Hawai’i part time. Their keyboard player is Hawaiian.

Dan Kois: Interesting! I didn’t know that. Also, it makes a pretty great sludgy dirge. Also I like how, unintentionally or slyly, he completely swallows Israel’s last name.

Matthew Perpetua: Man, I don’t think I could pronounce Kamakawiwoʻole properly if I sat here for an hour practicing it.

Dan Kois: Listen for the iambs! Ka-MA, ka-VEE, vo-OH-lay.

Matthew Perpetua: I trust tried that and for some reason I stumble over the syllables that start with v.

Dan Kois: Well, that’s why they invented the name “Iz.” So people like you and me wouldn’t have to say his name to buy his music.

Matthew Perpetua: Have you had much feedback on the book from people unfamiliar with Iz? Personally, I enjoyed it in part because I knew so little going in. It’s a surprising story.

Dan Kois: Not a lot yet! Because it is hard to convince people who are unfamiliar with Iz to read the book. But it definitely seems as though people who are interested in music, and the way music is listened to and sold, find a lot to chew on in Israel’s story. Plus his life was really pretty astonishing on a basic “Behind the Music” level.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah. I think it’s also very interesting in terms of how music spreads in different ways now, and how we have these alternative models for becoming well-known. It’s a really interesting case study for that.

Dan Kois: Right! Even with the Internet, the fact that a 1,000-lb Hawaiian man with a ukulele is about to go double platinum is pretty astonishing.

Matthew Perpetua: It really gives hope to all sorts of amazingly talented misfits. Susan Boyle owes him a debt, perhaps.

Dan Kois: I was just thinking of her! She’s one of the few artists for whom the disconnect between image and sound is as jarring to mainstream audiences as Iz’s.

Matthew Perpetua: At the same time, she’s marketed on those looks. The hook is that she’s this person who looks like the total opposite of anyone’s conception of a popular artist. People are attracted to the notion of her being a pure talent, which is the case with Iz as well.

Dan Kois: Right, whereas for all the things that has annoyed me about Mountain Apple, they’ve never once marketed Israel on being “the fat Hawaiian guy.” It’s always been the music they’ve sold. By all evidence he was a pure talent. He certainly had a great voice. He didn’t write many songs but some of them are great. And he could play a ukulele like the dickens — his bandmates all speak fondly of his skill with the instrument, even though he rarely tuned it very well.

Matthew Perpetua: I was thinking about how it seems like there is a boom in ukulele popularity. There are a lot of young people doing uke covers on YouTube, artists like Tune-Yards prominently feature the instrument instead of guitar. I saw this clip with a uke orchestra playing Spandeau Balet’s “True” on the British teen soap Skins. I think maybe Iz’s influence is part of that.

Dan Kois: Yeah — it’s at least partly attributable to Iz. It’s an instrument that is cheap and easy to learn. I will put that to the test as I am teaching myself uke for a reading in NYC in June. There’s also Jake Shimabukuro, the rock star of the uke, who was made for YouTube and could potentially follow in Iz’s footsteps.

Matthew Perpetua: There you go. We can now end this on a pun about ukulele music facing the future.

Dan Kois: I will let you make it. I can’t bear it.

Buy Dan Kois’ book about Facing Future from Amazon.