Tiki Talk with Ben Willis: Authentic Culture vs. Tiki

This week, Ben dives into the line between real island culture and the fantasy world tiki built around it.

From artifacts at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum to the classic Honolulu Cocktail and the sounds of Quiet Village… it’s a deeper look at the inspiration behind tiki culture during Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

It's Friday afternoon. It's time once again to light the torches for Tiki Talk on Mega Rock. Ben Willis with you. It is May, and that means, among other things, it is Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. And of course, you can't talk tiki without talking about the authentic cultures from Asia and the Pacific and Oceania that highly influenced tiki culture in the mainland U.S. Because for as exotic as it may seem, at its heart, tiki culture is a holy American mainland invention, reveling in its inauthenticity, drawing a lot of inspiration, yes, from Pacific, in particular Polynesian art and culture and music, the Caribbean, Australasia, and Hawaii in particular. In fact, as I've mentioned before, the word tiki comes from the Maori word for the first human, is deeply ingrained in their native culture. So it is very important to consider that tiki culture is in no way, shape, or form, truly representative of real Pacific culture. However, with this resurgence in tiki culture that has been happening since the late 1990s, there has been a major shift in the way people are approaching maybe more questionable aspects of tiki culture. And in many cases, among aficionados of tiki culture, you will find a very strong appreciation for authentic culture and preserving that and encouraging that, and making sure that that is not conflated with the wholly inauthentic tiki culture. And in fact, if you want to see some amazing examples of authentic Polynesian and oceanic culture, if you ever get a chance to go to Hawaii in Honolulu, maybe the best place to get that taste of real history is the Bishop Museum, houses hundreds of thousands of traditional artifacts and exhibits, not just from Hawaii, but from across the Pacific. And in fact, if you go to our Facebook page at MegaRockPA right now, you'll see several pictures of some absolutely fantastic exhibits at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. But what should we sip as we admire these amazing cultural artifacts? How about a wholly inauthentic cocktail, the Honolulu Cocktail, dating from the 1940s, and unearthed once again by Beach Bum Barry for his remixed gallery of Tiki Drinks's compendium of amazing cocktails? The Honolulu cocktail is as follows: Dissolve one teaspoon of super fine powdered sugar in one-quarter ounce of freshly squeezed lemon juice, add to that one-quarter ounce of orange juice, one quarter ounce of pineapple juice, one dash of Angustor bitters, and we're going to add one and one half ounces of a London dry gin. Shake all this in our shaker with some fresh ice cubes, and we're going to strain this up into a chilled cocktail glass. It's as simple as that. So until we meet on another island out there somewhere, this is Ben Willis saying Aloha. On Tiki Talk, we're going to leave you with an authentic tiki tune, once again, wholly inauthentic as it regards to anything of Pacific or South American or even African culture. Written and recorded originally in 1951 by the legendary Les Baxter. In 1959, Martin Denny would take it to number four on the Hot 100 chart, and it has become a staple of the Tiki songbook ever since. I'll leave you with the original lyre notes from Les Baxter. The jungle grows more dense as the riverboat slowly makes its way into the deep interior. A snake slithers into the water, flushing a brilliantly plugis bird who soars into the clearing above a quiet village. Here is a musical portrait of a tropical village deserted in the midday heat. So here it is from their 2022 album, Jungle of Steel. It's the Manakuras in their version of Quiet Village. On Tiki Talk on Mega Rock.