Recorded direct to digital at the Flamingo Studio in Valencia November 2023.

KIKA KILA

KIKA KILA is the Hawaiian name for lap steel guitar a guitar innovation invented at the end of the 19th Century by a Hawaiian school boy named Joseph Kekuku. He revolutionised the guitar and prepared it to take over 20th Century music world wide. Joseph’s invention was to first of all string his guitar with steel strings, then raise the strings from the finger board by means of a raised nut, the place where the strings come from the tuning pegs onto the finger board, and to then, instead of playing the guitar in the conventional manner, he laid it flat across his knees and in his left hand he held a small metal bar which he slide up and down the strings to play melodies. He also invented finger picks; thimble like pieces of metal which he wore on the ends of the fingers on his right hand, and a thumb pick. This made the sound louder when he plucked the strings. No one had ever done this before Joseph Kekuku did it. It was a revolution in terms of guitar playing and was a technical, mechanical and artistic achievement by someone considered by American and Europeans as being uncivilised, illiterate and in Christian terms, in need of his soul saving.

His invention and the music he made with it combined with the creative and artistic talents of his fellow Hawaiians spread, first of all around America and then the world during the first part of the 20th Century. It became the ‘trade mark’ of Hawaiians and was symbolic and an icon of Hawaiian resistance. Resistance to the colonial and empirical forces of the United States. Soon after Joseph’s revolution on January 17th 1893 a group of American sugar planters under Sanford Ballard Dole overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, the Hawaiian monarch, and establish a new provincial government with Dole as president. An act considered, even by the American Government at the time, illegal.

Hawaiian resistance to this situation took the form of an immediate revival of the Hawaiian language (which had been suppressed by Calvinist Missionaries) mainly through song and dance. The Hula, a sacred dance for Hawaiians, and Mele (songs, chants and poetry) were performed, even for white non-Hawaiian audiences, in private and in public, but took on a form of resistance as new hula and mele were written and performed. Prior to the arrival of Europeans Hawaiian culture was oral. They had no written language and knowledge was transmitted through cultural exchange. Hula is a dance form with poetry and information transmitted by movement. New Mele were written and performed in Hawaiian and as most non Hawaiians had little or no knowledge of the language, they failed to understand the hidden messages of resistance in both the songs and the dance. The result was a Hawaiian unity that spread around the world and even to other Pacific Nations.
At the start of the 20th century and until the 1930’s the then early recording industry recorded and sold more Hawaiian music than any other genre. Joseph Kekuku’s invention by then had spread around the world and had ‘colonised’ all forms and genre of music. His invention led, indirectly, to the invention of the first electric guitar, which was a Hawaiian guitar, which in its turn ‘colonised’ the rest of the world.
In a communication to the State of Hawai‘i dated February 25, 2018 from Dr. Alfred M. deZayas, a United Nations Independent Expert, the UN official acknowledged the prolonged occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom. He wrote: “As a professor of international law, the former Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee, co-author of the book, The United Nations Human Rights Committee Case Law 1977-2008, and currently serving as the UN Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, I have come to understand that the lawful political status of the Hawaiian Islands is that of a sovereign nation-state that is under a strange form of occupation by the United States resulting from an illegal military occupation and a fraudulent annexation. As such, international laws (the Hague and Geneva Conventions) require that governance and legal matters within the occupied territory of the Hawaiian Islands must be administered by the application of the laws of the occupied state (in this case, the Hawaiian Kingdom), not the domestic laws of the occupier (the United States).”
The statement is relevant, as we enter 2024, to a situation similar to the one described above being perpetrated at the other end of the sea from where I write this.
Two relevant and essential books - Noise Uprising - The Audio Politics of A World Music Revolution by Michael Denning
Kika Kila - How The Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed The Sound Of Modern Music by John W Troutman.
Mike Cooper / January 2024 / Valencia-Spain.