Music of Hawaiʻi

Summary

Hawaiʻi has an island musical public connecting Native Hawaiian expression, local popular music and wider Pacific circulation. Mele, hula song, slack-key and steel guitar, contemporary Hawaiian music and island reggae provide different ways into that world. Music expresses relationships with land, language and community, while the islands' interacting populations have also sustained their own repertoires.

The local listening landscape includes international pop, hip-hop, R&B, country and other music alongside Hawaiian and island-reggae formats. Honolulu radio provides one documented window into that mixture, although it cannot represent all islands or every listening medium. Hawaiʻi Public Radio's programming also connects local performance with archival and contemporary Pasifika sounds, reinforcing the islands' role within a wider oceanic musical conversation.

Contemporary and trending

Hawaiʻi Public Radio's February 2026 schedule introduced After Hours: Ua Noa, hosted by Leimomi Bong, explicitly bringing archival and contemporary Pasifika music together. The same programme update included electronic/soul, jazz/funk, country-related and global-reggae strands, as well as HPR Hōʻike's locally produced music and storytelling. This is direct evidence of programming choices made for listeners at home and abroad.

Honolulu's 2026 radio listings include stations serving Hawaiian music and reggae alongside adult contemporary, hip-hop and other formats. Hawaiian 105 KINE and Island 98.5 identify their own musical focus, while the Nielsen table concerns subscribing stations in a defined metropolitan survey area. No ratings figures are reproduced here, and those data should not be extended into an all-island ranking. Public television's 2025 In Hawaiian Hands project adds another current example of local reflection on reggae's history and continuing significance.

History

Native Hawaiian chant carried stories, knowledge and relationships before written transcription. Later encounters with Christian hymnody, introduced string instruments and immigrant communities contributed to new musical forms. Smithsonian Folkways' cultural account follows both Hawaiian expression and communities with roots in Portugal, Japan, China, Okinawa, the Philippines and elsewhere. These developments belong within the islands' musical history rather than outside an imagined pure tradition.

Slack-key guitar developed through family and community transmission and later recording, with Dancing Cat's history documenting different practitioners and tunings. Steel guitar has a related but distinct Hawaiian history, associated especially with Joseph Kekuku and the movement of the instrument beyond the islands. Reggae's local adaptation adds a later chapter: PBS Hawaiʻi's documentary description identifies the late 1980s and early 1990s as an important period in musicians making reggae their own.

Genres

Mele and oli, hula-related song, falsetto singing and instrumental traditions provide different listening paths. Bishop Museum's archival project on A Hilo Wau E Hoʻolulu Ka Lehua, for example, identifies a particular chest-slapping hula rather than treating hula as one uniform musical form. Such specific documentation helps connect sound and movement with a named repertoire and performance history.

Kī hō‘alu, or slack-key, uses altered guitar tunings and fingerstyle approaches documented through particular musicians and teaching traditions. Steel guitar instead emphasizes sliding pitch through a bar applied to the strings; the two should not be confused simply because both have Hawaiian histories. Island reggae, often called Jawaiian, supplies another popular vocabulary, while broader Pacific and international styles remain part of everyday media.

Artists

Israel Kamakawiwoʻole and the Brothers Cazimero remain useful introductions to different Hawaiian recording careers, documented in Mountain Apple Company's catalogue. Kapena offers another route into the island-popular world through an active performance and recording catalogue. George “Fiji” Veikoso's legacy connects Hawaiʻi with a wider Pacific musical public; ABC Pacific's memorial programme presents the Fijian-born artist within that regional context.

Slack-key listening can follow the relationships among elders and later players documented in Dancing Cat's histories and liner notes, including Gabby Pahinui, Sonny Chillingworth and Keola Beamer. Contemporary cultural work extends beyond those familiar names: Māhealani Uchiyama's Pōpoloheno project with participants including Kalani Peʻa links performance, storytelling and the theme of resilience. These references offer starting points without turning historical fame into a claim about today's chart positions.

Boundary definition and research

The approved region follows the Hawaiian Islands through the state-level geographic unit. Island coastlines provide the working display boundary. Honolulu's urban and suburban public and the neighbour islands' towns and rural communities are related but not identical, and the evidence reviewed here does not establish a defensible separate preference ranking for each island.

The geographic home of this music is narrower than its audiences. Recordings, touring, radio and family connections reach the continental United States and other Pacific islands. The article preserves the existing Hawaiʻi entry's emphasis on Native Hawaiian expression, local popular music and Pacific circulation, while expanding its historical and practitioner evidence. Radio measurements are explicitly metropolitan, archival accounts describe particular repertoires, and no geographic dataset is treated as a measure of musical preference.