10/21/2026
The distributors told his manager not to put it out.
“It’s just, it’s just too far out. Nobody is going to get this.”
It was a comedy record with no music on it. Local-style comedy, local characters.
James Kawika Piʻimauna Reiplinger came from a family that performed. His mother, Lila, was a well-known hula dancer. His relatives played music every Sunday, and they still warned him off the stage.
“My relatives always said, ‘Don’t be a performer. You’re going to starve,’” he remembered. “And there they were, every Sunday, playing music.”
He finished Punahou in 1968. At 17 he was already hanging around the open-mic nights at the Tao Coffeehouse on King Street. His nickname was “Rep.” A student DJ at KTUH misheard it, and the name Rap stuck.
In August 1975, Rap Reiplinger, James Grant Benton and Ed Kaʻahea launched Booga Booga at the Territorial Tavern in downtown Honolulu. A $1 cover. Sixteen tables. Billy Sage, who saw the show many times, said the audience was “always rolling in the aisles.” In Jon de Mello’s words, they went “from starving to death to $5,000 a week.”
By 1977 Booga Booga had split up and Rap was in Los Angeles. De Mello told him to come home, that a ticket would be waiting at the United counter. He came home the next day.
Then came Poi Dog, in 1978. On it was “Room Service”: a hotel operator, a mainland guest named Mr. Fogarty, and a line kamaʻāina still say out loud. “Russell, you get pen?”
The distributors were wrong. Radio legend Hal “Aku” Lewis called to ask if he could cut the bit up and use pieces on his show. A Honolulu police officer played part of it over the department’s two-way radio. De Mello said they were flying in 8,000 to 9,000 records a week just to keep up.
A Hōkū award. An Emmy for Rap’s Hawaii. Packed clubs. A stadium laughing at once.
Comedian Paul Ogata saw him only once, at a political rally at Aloha Stadium. “Fifty thousand people laughing. It was awesome.”
The money came late. In 1979 he joked that his pay, “spread out over the eight years I’ve worked for free,” came to “a buck-fifty an hour.”
By the 1980s, he was having more mood swings, and he arranged to have a doctor evaluate him. His widow later said he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder that was never properly treated, and that even while he was really trying to kick co***ne, he self-medicated.
In 1983 he met Leesa Clark, a broadcast journalist. They married that October. “I want to grow old with you,” he told her.
Then January 1984. Rap went missing in Leesa’s car. Six days later, Leesa and his sister Holly found the car near a Maunawili trail. On January 25, police recovered his body on a brushy hillside above Maunawili Stream. He was 33 years old. They had been married three months.
He made Hawaii laugh. He made it to 33.
At his memorial, his friends told jokes, because they believed Rap would want people to laugh. His ashes were scattered at sea.
Toxicology pointed to co***ne. Some people called it su***de. Leesa never accepted that. “Nobody close to him ever believed that,” she said.
Three years later, in 1987, the Hawaii Board of Education tried to allow only standard English in public schools. Educators, parents and community groups pushed back, and the effort failed.
In 2004, twenty years after he died, HONOLULU Magazine named Poi Dog one of the 50 greatest Hawaii albums of all time. It was the only nonmusic album on the list.
In December 2013, the state Attorney General’s office told Leesa it had opened a death investigation into the case. In 2019, she published his life story, built on more than 50 interviews. In 2024, a Civil Beat columnist told people trying to put down roots here that there is a shortcut: go watch Rap’s Hawaii. He called “Russell, you get pen?” a test of local credentials. Comedian Andy Bumatai put it simplest: “if you laugh at Rap, you must be local.”
Next time somebody asks to borrow a pen, listen to how they say it.
They said nobody was going to get it. Hawaii still does.
His name was Rap Reiplinger.
