HAWAIIAN BLACK METAL

Honolulu-based Kuka'ilimoku are proof that misery, darkness, and filth can be conjured even on golden beaches and beneath sunny blue skies. Inexplicably recorded onto cassette and presumably from several rooms away, their self-titled EP sounds like suffering being shoved through a landline headset. What it lacks in listenability, it makes up for in “boundless disgust and hatred for those unwanted in this dominion”—“this dominion” being the Hawaiian islands, and “those unwanted” being you.

Editorial director Dave Carnie and all the other haoles over at CREEM are unequipped to understand or contend with the brutal screams that come spewing out in opposition to a history of violent cultural destruction, so, being Hawaiian, I was asked to do it for them. Carnie did request that I point out a missed opportunity in naming a black metal band from Hawaii “Lava Rock,” because lava is black, and metal is rock, and I’ll give him that. However, in my research for this article, I’ve discovered quite a few black metal bands of Hawaiian descent and, as much as I’d like it if they were, they can’t all be named Lava Rock. It’d get confusing. You'd think you booked Lava Rock, but you really booked Lava Rock, and then Lava Rock show up and the crowd is disappointed because they don’t rock quite as hard as Kuka’ilimoku.

Much in the way that Justin Bieber sang songs about sex with multiple partners despite being a virgin and a child, black metal acts in places like Norway and Nebraska sing songs about death and destruction despite having never come near it. Then when they do desperately vie for some legitimacy by burning down a church in a field in the middle of nowhere, they make sure no one’s inside first. Lucking posers. Unlike their pale northern counterparts, Kuka'ilimoku have the ammunition and experience, unloading all of the brutal hatred that comes as a by-product of hundreds of years of violent repression, colonization, plague, death, and destruction inflicted upon Hawaii and Hawaiians.

It may have been recorded on a Walkman, but the Kuka'ilimoku EP's got tme, righteous rage, packed with the sort of proper "fuck you” that has begun to slide away from oncecontroversial punk and metal genres, creating a vacuum that then gets filled with inauthentic theatrical bullshit, like rivalries over how much darker your outfit is than mine, and how much more killed my lamb is than yours.

Kuka’ilimoku’s songs exist with legitimacy amid deformed genres fraught with hypocrisy. Pale skinny white men in clown makeup and black dresses have

been screaming condemnation at the church for years; meanwhile their ancestors are the ones who raised the cross on our islands and overthrew our sovereignty for sugar profits and beachfront property. Think about that: guys screaming about paganism, when their great-greatgranddads are the ones who first handed Hawaiians the bible; guys writing songs about plagues and death, when their great-uncle gave my great-uncle smallpox, all while they put sugar in their tea and ate pineapple cake in their hundred-year-old house that was bought with Hawaiian plantation money. So while Kuka’ilimoku have everything to rage against, what do these other whiny fucks have to scream about? Not a goddamn thing.