Post #784315 by Prikli Pear on Sat, Feb 24, 2018 8:24 PM

For the limited amount of time I've spent here, it seems to come in waves. There's a flurry of posts and updates, then a lull. Partly to blame, as others have said, is Facebook and Instagram and other platforms. I'm on them and interact daily, so yeah, when TC was the only game in town it would make sense there was more activity here. But have you ever tried to find old conversations on those other sites? Ugh! I can't even get a decent search of my own "wall" of FB. They're transient. TC, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its archaic message board infrastructure, is more of a permanent record. That's why I come back here daily and check all the updates and find old threads to wade through. It's interesting and allows me to connect with an earlier phase of the tiki revival. I'm getting that with older podcasts as well, but TC is the main source of tiki history for me.

I understand there was a period of fallings-out that disrupted TC some years ago. I expect that had an effect as well, but as there isn't a "great flamewars of TC" topic, I'll never know the extent.

As for the tiki revival, as I'm only a relative newcomer to tiki, I can speak with an outsider's perspective. I've heard folks here, along with others like Bosko and Sven talk about tiki now being "mainstream." That actually hasn't happened yet, although I can see it may look that way from inside. The Party City stuff doesn't really count. The resin statuary at Garden Ridge/At Home/Hobby Lobby/Home Depot/Lowes are ephemera. The folks picking those things up are getting them for the kitsch, or the Margaritaville influence. Yes, there are new tiki bars opening, but more are tiki lite, just giving lip service to the concept. The majority of the population still has no idea tiki bars exist--when I visited Portland, I ran into a woman originally from Dallas who'd lived there a decade and had no idea Hale Pele or the Alibi existed until that very day. The vast, vast, vast majority of the U.S. population still views tiki as something that existed only in the 1950s and maybe 60s. That was me up until 18 months ago. Tiki's no longer in danger of extinction, but it's still a way from being mainstream. Sven calls it the cult of tiki, and that's a good description. There are lots of cultural movements that are healthy and thriving, even growing, that are not mainstream.

I know Swanky has predicted that investors will soon put together a national chain of tiki bars of some sort. That's possible. But it hasn't happened yet. The closest thus far is Margaritaville, and while I like Buffett (1st Church of, Reformed) the crass commerciality of that place just makes my skin crawl.

Tiki bars are not as ubiquitous as they were in the 50s and 60s. We don't have small, hole-in-the-wall places popping up across the country. Austin's got nothing. San Antonio, nothing. Corpus Christi, Galveston, Fort Worth, nothing nothing nothing. Pull up Critiki, and there are more cities than not without even tiki lite. No, we're never going to get the great palaces to come back from the dead. Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic aren't going to pop up in St. Louis and Memphis. Entrepreneurs aren't going to build Mai Kais and Kahikis in Albuquerque and Birmingham and Little Rock. But there's a tremendous untapped market out there, millions of people who have no idea this exists, no idea what they're missing.

I could be completely misreading the scenario. Tiki may have already crested and we're now riding the ebb tide out to sea. But I don't think so. I think it's got another solid decade of growth ahead, with more tiki bars (good and bad) opening and closing and expanding in the years to come. It may not foster a tight-knit, passionate community akin to what existed here on TC circa 2002-2010, but I think it's going to be vibrant and trail-blazing in its own way. Again, I may be completely wrong on my take, but all the same, I'm eager to see what comes next.