Makana (musician)

Makana
Makana performing for supporters of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally in Phoenix 2016
Background information
Genres	Folk-punk, rock
Instruments	guitar
Years active	1994-present
Website	makanamusic.com

Makana (who is so named as it is the Hawaiian word meaning “the gift”), born Matthew Swalinkavich, is an award-winning slack-key guitar player, singer, and composer.

Born and raised in Hawaii, his guitar playing has been featured on three Grammy-nominated albums, including the soundtrack of the Academy-Award winning film "The Descendants", starring George Clooney. In 2008, he was second runner up in Guitar Player Magazine's Guitar Superstar competition eliciting praise from judges Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and Elliot Easton. In 2012, he was awarded one of Hawaii's top musical honors: a Na Hoku Ki Ho'alu (Slack Key) Legacy Award (Hawaii's “Grammy”) by the Hawaii Academy of Recording Arts.

On November 12, 2011, Makana, who had performed previously at the White House, turned a gig performing at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation dinner in Honolulu, attended by President Barack Obama and the leaders of 18 other nations, into a political protest. He started out his performance by playing traditional Hawaiian music, which then started to veer gently into more controversial territory. When nearing the end of his set, he opened his suit jacket to reveal a T-shirt with the words "Occupy With Aloha" handwritten on it and proceeded to play a song he had recently written called "We Are the Many", a folky protest song expressing Makana's dissatisfaction with the current disproportion of wealth and failure of democracy and his support of the Occupy movement. “I started out very cautiously because my intention was not to disrupt their dinner. My intention was to subliminally convey a message that I felt was paramount to the negotiations,” Makana told CNN. “Eventually I got enough courage to go into it for an extended period of time. And I ended my show with the line ‘the bidding of the many not the few.’ I sang it about fifty times in different ways for them to hear”, resulting in a song that lasted 45 minutes. Rolling Stone Magazine went on to call "We Are the Many" the "anthem of the Occupy movement."