Although he sang about the rights of his disadvantaged countrymen, Israel Kamakawiwoʻole only registered in the general consciousness as the ‘gentle giant’ who played the American standards.

Israel Kamakawiwoʻole is one of the symbols of Hawaii. One can argue about the artistic significance of his work, but one can also see the difficult history of the island nation reflected in the fate of this musician, as if peering into the waters of the Pacific Ocean. This history speaks not only through his life story and lyrics. The way Kamakawiwoʻole’s songs were received – so strongly correlated with the nationality of the listener – also says as much about the fate and misery of the Hawaiians. Considering that these two perspectives on the creativity of the artist, who died in 1997, cannot be reconciled, one could say that he warranted two biographies: the local and the global; the prosaic and the Hollywood. One of them could have been written by the left-wing historian Howard Zinn, the second could have