Tiki culture

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"The Bali Ha'i", a restaurant in New Orleans in the 1950s

The Tiki culture or Tiki style or also Polynesian pop describes a wave of fashion that is reflected in the design of countless art and everyday objects such as cocktail mugs (tiki mugs), lamps, body jewelry and sculptures as well as in residential buildings, bars, restaurants and Hotel architecture found its way. It peaked in the late 1950s to early 1960s, especially after Hawaii became the 50th state in the United States in 1959 .

The exotic wave subsided in the 1970s, and in the 1980s its products began to disappear again on a large scale from the public image, especially in the USA. During this time, the relics of a hardly thematized pop culture were rediscovered by a new generation and the term “Tiki” was expanded to become a general term for South Seas-inspired trivial culture. From the mid-1990s onwards, starting in California, there was a “Tiki revival” that also affected Europe and Australia.

history

Tikis mostly represent figures of ancestors or gods carved out of wood (e.g. Koa wood in Hawai'i), but some are also made of stone. They are by no means idols, but rather a kind of "sacred vessels" into which the deities first had to be “called into” through ceremonies and rituals, in order to then leave them again after they had fulfilled their task. The term can be found directly on the Marquesas Islands, but also occurs as Hei-Tiki among the Māori in New Zealand , where it stands for the figurative representation of an embryo. Hei-Tiki are often carved from pounamu (greenstone, New Zealand jade, nephrite ) and worn on a flax cord as an amulet around the neck.

After the Second World War , in which numerous American and Japanese soldiers came into contact with the local culture during the fighting in the South Seas , the term "Tiki" found its way into Western cultures - initially mainly on the west coast of the USA, and later worldwide . Here it developed in the course of a general South Sea and exotic fashion to designate all kinds of "primitive" gods figures, also for imitations that are either made only for western tourists or even by artists in the West in partly very free imitation of Forms of South Sea art arise. The takeover of Tikis in western trivial culture was favored by modern art, when artists such as the post-impressionist Paul Gauguin , Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque or André Masson discovered their “primitive art of the indigenous peoples” at the end of the 19th century Avant-garde tendencies such as Dadaism , Surrealism and - in the case of the German artists from the group Die Brücke - merged with expressionism in painting and sculpture to form primitivism . The term became known worldwide in 1947 through the Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl , who wanted to prove the possibility of colonizing the South Seas from South America with a raft trip from Ecuador to the Polynesian Tuamotu Islands. The literary processing of the expedition became a worldwide bestseller under the title Kon-Tiki - a raft floating across the Pacific .

music

There are also complementary approaches in music that can be classified as Polynesian Pop , such as B. Hawaiian Hapa Haole Songs , Hawaiian Novelties , Tamouré and Exotica .

Hapa Haole

At the beginning of the 20th century, Hawaiian musicians began to write many of their songs half in English and half in Hawaiian ( Hapa Haole ) in order to have more international success. This style became popular all over the world and has also inspired many non-Hawaiians around the world to play this music (like Felix Mendelson in England, the Hula Hawaiians in Switzerland or Frank Baum in Germany; also groups like the Hula Hawaiian Quartet , the Hilo Hawaiians , the Kilima Hawaiians ).

Hawaiian Novelty

Hawaii was the ultimate dream destination for every American in the 1950s and a projection for paradise on earth that was found again. The result was a veritable flood of recordings in the so-called Hawaiian Novelty style , in which the popular music styles such as B. Rock 'n' Roll combined with Hawaiian elements. Countless artists from the fields of Western Swing , Hillbilly , Country , Rockabilly , R'n'B , Rock 'n' Roll, Pop , Jazz , Latin , were inspired by the South Seas.

Examples are:

Even Jimmie Rodgers ( Everybody Does It in Hawaii ) or Jerry Byrd , who was famous for his Hawaiian Novelty sound, titles took in on Novelty style. Even before the 1950s, there was a flood of Hawaiian musicians and Hawaiian bands.

Tamouré

The traditional "Vini-Vini" from Tahiti became hits worldwide in new recordings and in the early 1960s sparked a worldwide enthusiasm for the dance tamouré and its rhythms from Tahiti. German versions came from the Tahiti Tamourés , Wyn Hoop and Jane Swärd (the GDR version), Italian from Betty Curtis , those from the USA from Bill Justis , Don Costa and Arthur Lyman , Dutch from the Kilima Hawaiians and Ria Valk , Tahitian There are versions of Les Kaveka , Charlie Mauu & Roche's Tahitians and Terorotua And His Tahitians, among others .

Exotica

The Exotica -music be mentioned in this context, but more elements includes Caribbean as Polynesian music.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Doug Harvey: Gone Primitive. In: Douglas A. Nason, Jeff Fox, Doug Harvey: Night of the Tiki. The art of Shag, Schmaltz and selected primitive oceanic carvings. Exhibition catalog. San Francisco 2001, p. 41.
  2. ↑ Jutta Frings, Dorothee von Drachenfels (ed.): James Cook and the discovery of the South Seas. Munich 2009, p. 256.
  3. ↑ Karl von den Steinen: The Marquesans and their art. Primitive South Sea ornamentation. Volume 2: Plastic. Berlin 1928, p. 78.
  4. ↑ hapa : "half", haole : term for white people, see hapa haole in Hawaiian Dictionaries .