Blog en Abyme

When I was a kid, I spent many summers with family in Hawaii.  [Don't worry, I'm not about to complain about it.]  My grandparents were pretty invested in making sure that I, half Korean kid raised on the mainland, got a sense of the varied cultures that made up the landscape of Hawaii, and local music (and food, let’s not forget the food!!) made up a big part of that.  My grandfather was a bit of a whiz on the ukelele, and would occasionally bring it out and give me a taste of traditional Hawaiian songs.  Thanks to the beauty of YouTube, I can give you an example:

Not bad, right?  Mellifluous, lovely…but a bit staid for my young self (who was, as previously noted, busy grooving to The Thompson Twins and the like).  Despite the encouragement of both my grandparents and my mother, I never felt inclined to pick up the ukelele.  Four strings?  No bass?  It’s a bit tinny and too high to rock, right?

And thus we get the title of my post—my damnable lack of imagination.  Because I was busy trolling the archives over at Angry Asian Man today (all things Asian American pop culture and a Bruce Lee  fan to boot!), and he’s got a link up to a Jake Shimabukuro performance on Conan O’Brien, in which he plays George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”  Reposted here, for your viewing pleasure:

Holy moly!  Why, why did no one ever tell me that the tiny but powerful ukelele could do that, in the right hands?  Here I thought if I took it up I’d have to be standing on a stage somewhere wearing a grass skirt and a lei.  But no!  I could have been ripping it up with Beatles tunes!  Or, like this kid, classics from the Cars, or even, dare I say it, like Will Smith (who knew?!)!  That will teach me to ignore family knowledge.

All hail the mighty ukelele.  Don’t let its size fool you like it fooled me.