Post #586157 by tikibars on Fri, Apr 22, 2011 11:51 PM

Hi Shipman

Just found this thread... and I will admit to skipping to the end and replying before reading other replies, so as not to be biased by them.

So.
When I wrote:

"We like to think that all of the iconography of Poly Pop comes from a single island, the isle of Tiki. This place of gathering is located south of Hawai'i, north of Aotearoa [New Zealand], east of French Polynesia, and west of Rapa Nui [Easter Island]." ...

...I was of course referring to an imaginary place in Polynesia that is centrally located between all of the mentioned island groups, but which is part of none of them. The point was that Polynesian Pop draws inspiration from many parts of the Polynesian triangle, but is truly not a real part of any one of the many diverse cultures of Polynesia.

As I see it, Tiki is the mythology of an imaginary island, positioned exactly where my words have placed it. I like to imagine Tiki as an ersatz island that has been influenced by all of the cultures surrounding it, but which it truly a part of none of them.
It is prolly' populated by a bunch of rum-soaked haoles too.

We all (hopefully) respect the real-life Maori, the Rapa Nui, the Haiwai'ians, etc., and understand that Tiki is not truly a part of any of these cultures, but a fantasy melding of them all that (again) I like to think exists at an imaginary central point, geographically located between them all.

But where did "Tiki" as a meme or pop phenomenon truly originate?

In spite of all of the so-called pre-tiki or tropical junk that existed, I personally peg the seed of it all it at Don the Beachcomber in Los Angeles, in 1934... and then it spread and grew and changed...

But in a lot of ways, Tiki as we know it today is more about the nostalgia for the 1940s to 1960s Tiki, which has been molded in our contemporary perspective by Sven, Otto, Shag, me, and many others who began discovering its joys in the late 1980s-early 1990s.

I have yet to meet many people who were actually Tiki bar fanatics - Tiki fanboys so to speak - in 1961 or so, or people who can talk of Tiki from an enthusiastic customer's , opposed to being a bar or restaurant owner or a decor creator. Was anyone in the 1950s or 1960s actually more enthused about Tiki then than the average bored urbanist is about Thai or Indian dining now? Have any of you seen evidence? Maybe there's a thread about this, I've be out of the loop lately...
I think the fanboy/meme aspect of Tiki may not have existed (outside of a small SoCal enclave) until the early 1990s, when Otto started Tiki News, Sven started his seminars, and I started Tiki Bar Review Pages.

My two cents....!