“OOF!” is what America did to Hawai’i

The Seattle Times ran an interview with Geologic of the Blue Scholars hip hop group.  Geo grew up in Hawai’i and was inspired by recent visits to write new songs about Hawai’i. The product is a new EP entitled “OOF!”.    Here’s an excerpt from the interview.

I don’t understand the title of “OOF!”

We actually did not put much thought into the title. What we do sometimes if we can’t come up with a dope title, we’ll just do like with films and whatnot, and give it a working title until we can think of something doper. That moment never happened with “OOF!”

I suggested it as a joke. The word itself is like a pidjin-ized local Hawaiian word that comes from the Samoan language, where oof, spelled u-f, or u-f-f, is basically a colloquial term equivalent to the word “f__k.” So it can be sexual, it’s…it’s mostly sexual.

Like, “We went home and we oof-ed”?

Yeah. Just like that. The titling of the EP as “OOF!” is kind of like an inside joke, and it’s kind of an inside joke that I played on Sabzi myself, being that he was intrigued by the title, but he actually didn’t know what it meant. Even after we approved the title and everything was sent to the manufacturer, he found out afterwards what the word really meant. I think he thought it was…

Nonsense?

Or, you know, the expression when you fall or hit something. And if that’s how you interpret it, that’s cool, too. What I’ve been telling people lately is “OOF!” is what America did to Hawaii. By pimping its resources and using it as a strategic military Pacific outpost, and just the destruction to the people and their land in the name of development. That permeates Hawaii.

This is a video of one of the tracks “HI-808”:

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