Post #3422 by hanford_lemoore on Mon, Jul 8, 2002 2:24 AM

On 2002-07-05 10:31, tikitommy wrote:

but why create this "authentic" paradise only to fill it with noise???

Good question. We see this time and time again: San Fran Bay bars Lilo Lounge (R.I.P.) Bamboo Hut, Tiki Tom's, etc. Why would you go through the trouble to create a whole Tiki Bar (which is rare) and then go on to not fill it it with the right music?

Here are my thoughts:

On the Tiki Crawl we got a lot of people who absolutely love the decor, the whole concept, the drinks, etc, but are totally ignorant that it's a Scene (most of these people are Driftwood though; people who join the crawl while hearing about it while at one of the stops).

I guess, for a lot of these people, there is no connection between a Tiki bar and Tiki music. Most of them have never heard of Exotica. Perhaps they enjoy the Tiki bar becuase it reminds them of a trip to Hawaii or other tropical islands. Of course, you have about as much chance at hearing Exotica in a bar in Hawaii as you do in the states. So their memory is of sipping a Pena Colata at a Resort Bar, with decent hawaiian architecture and plants, but with a TV tuned to CNN and Madonna playing in the background.

In a way these people are more pure than us Tikiphiles here becuase they're not interested in experiencing a long-lost moment from 50 years ago, but rather to reexperience something they experienced themselves in the last, say, 10.

So there's a big disconnection there... perhaps to the layman a Tiki Bar isn't retro at all (just tropical) but Exotica is.

Okay, that was a little rambling. It's late. Er, early.

(a little off-topic but check out some of the music listed at the beginning of the Modern Tiki Music thread.

~Hanford

[ Edited by: hanford_lemoore on 2002-07-08 02:25 ]