Listen but Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific by Kevin Fellezs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Listen but Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific by Kevin Fellezs James Revell Carr Listen but Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific. By Kevin Fellezs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. [xvii, 316 p. ISBN 9781478005995 (hardcover), $104.95; ISBN 9781478006718 (paperback), $28.95; ISBN 9781478007418 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, glossary. Maps of the earth typically cut the Pacific Ocean in half, literally marginalizing one third of the planet’s surface and the people who have inhabited and explored that vast region for millennia. In his recent book, Listen but Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific, Kevin Fellezs seeks to recenter the Pacific and one of its most well-known music traditions. Moving from Hawaii to cultural outposts in California and Japan, Fellezs examines the ways in which players of the Hawaiian guitar style, kı̄ hō‘alu, more commonly known as “slack key guitar,” have represented Hawaiian-ness through musical performance. Fellezs uses his own complex genealogy, with ancestors from Hawaii, Japan, Portugal, and the Philippines, as a metaphor for the complicated multicultural history of Hawaiian music. He further complicates his own relationship to Hawaiian culture by discussing his upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area, as part of a Hawaiian ‘ohana (family) in diaspora, which leads him to ask, “What constitutes Hawaiian belonging?” (p. 2). And furthermore, “How do diasporic Hawaiians fit in any discussion of indigeneity and cultural performance and performativity? How might Japanese guitarists reproduce or challenge the long history of cultural appropriation, commodification, and non-Hawaiian indigenization accomplished through ‘Hawaiian at heart’ rhetoric?” (p. 3). In order to answer these questions, Fellezs employs four Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) terms (p. 7) representing central concepts of this musical practice: kuleana (prerogative or responsibility), aloha (love), ‘ohana (extended family), and pono (holistic balance). One of the most fascinating dimensions of the book is the author’s discussion of how key Hawaiian words such as these were manipulated by Christian missionaries when they began to establish English-language translations for Hawaiian concepts, using purposeful mistranslation to justify their own appropriation and exploitation of Hawaiian lands and cultural properties. By reorienting these Hawaiian terms and employing indigenous Hawaiian concepts as the foundation for his critical approach to the topic, Fellezs clearly articulates the values and aesthetics of a music culture with distinct ways of belonging that nevertheless has transcended its ethnic and [End Page 426] geographic origins to become a truly global form of popular music. In chapter 1, Fellezs describes an oral/aural musical pedagogy that rings familiar to participants in many folk-music genres, in which achieving the proper kind of feeling is prioritized over technical mastery (p. 77). It becomes clear through the author’s analysis that perhaps the most crucial element in the effective performance of kı̄ hō‘alu is achieving the right kind of feeling, known among slack key players as the “nahenahe (sweet, gentle, and melodious) aesthetic” (p. 19). While there is much debate in slack key circles over whether or not one can learn to play with this feeling regardless of one’s personal connection to the Hawaiian islands, Fellezs shows that this nahanahe aesthetic is one of Hawaii’s most recognizable musical exports, influencing musicians on both sides of the Pacific and beyond. Chapter 1 also introduces the godfather of modern slack key guitar, Gabby Pahinui, who, along with ukulele virtuoso and historian Eddie Kamae and their group, Sons of Hawaii, was a key figure in the Second Hawaiian Renaissance. Pahinui repopularized the slack key genre and became a mentor for many other Hawaiian musicians who propagated and progressed the music in the late twentieth century, like Sonny Chillingworth, Ledward Kaapana, Keola and Kapono Beamer, Raymond Kane, and Gabby Pahinui’s son, Cyril. Fellezs briefly addresses the lack of women in the discourse around slack key, pointing to female guitarists like Noelani Māahoe, who released albums of slack key music prior to the Second Hawaiian Renaissance, as evidence that the role of women in the development, transmission, and preservation of the Hawaiian slack key tradition has been badly undervalued. He speculates that although...