Post #609357 by emspace on Fri, Oct 7, 2011 10:49 AM

Did I really join January 2003? Holy crap...anyway sorry I missed this thread, because now I have to come in late to the party just to say:

Rock was the DEATH of Tiki. When rock invaded the world - especially Hawaii - that was the end. Steel guitars got hung up in pawn shops and yes, even Hawaiians stopped playing their own music, and Tiki temples the world over started going out of business and turning into generic restaurants and parking lots. Rock culture insisted that the Tiki culture of their parents was embarrassing, cheesy, trite, dead as the dodo. So don't rockabilly me no rockabillies, and don't surf me no California twangy guitars. That...is NOT...Tiki! Just because Cali beach boys bought those cute lil' Coco Joe amulets to wear around their necks does not make the rest of their culture Tiki.

The problem here, if there is one, is that everyone wants their personal thing to be "Tiki", and to hell with the roots and the tradition and the beauty that is and was Tiki. Jimmy Buffet? Tiki. "Anarchy in the UK"? Tiki. Bollocks! Bossa nova isn't Tiki, and neither is calypso. This discussion has been done to death here before, and every time it's down to exotica and Hawaiian music, with maybe some soupcons of Tahitian bamboo. Swanky's two compilations - remember them? - do pretty well at summing it up; the two Eden Ahbez songs add a bit of beatnik to the mixes, but they lean heavily toward the exotica rubric, especially "The Old Boat".

The more unrelated crap you add to a culture, the more vague and watery it becomes - like drowning good booze with too much mixer, dig? Your personal thing is your personal thing, and you're entitled to it, but calling it Tiki just because you WANT it to be Tiki don't make it Tiki. You talk about how the culture has evolved? I call it devolution brought on by people insisting their thing is part of the Tiki thing. Very typical 90s attitude IMO, no surprises really.

And Tiki Cowboy, you have it totally back-asswards when you say:

"The history of the popular Hawaiian sound was helped to be shaped by mainland musicians in the early to mid 1900's with the inclusion especially of pedal steel and lap steel guitars, also used in both country and Hawaiian music."

The steel guitar is a purely Hawaiian invention as all of us who play it know, and the first country steel players learned their chops from listening to Hawaiian music! This is open history available to anyone who wants to do some reading as opposed to assuming. You look up Leon McAuliffe and Joaquin Murphey, Hoot Gibson - there's a reason all those early guys, right up to Bud Isaacs on pedal, included Hawaiian songs on their albums! There's a reason Jerry Byrd - who was inspired to take up the steel by listening to "Hawaii Calls" on the radio - moved to Hawaii after a long and highly successful career as country music's first-call steel player, to try to inspire Hawaiians to take up their own instrument, long buried as a result of the mainland pop invasion!

I could go on but I think I've made my point, hopefully: exotica and Polynesian music, everything else is dross, like remoras that have attached themselves to a mighty Great White to hitch a ride.

BTW I am not fuming in high dudgeon as I write this; stating the obvious isn't stressful.