Waitiki

I used to hate doing research.  Coming up with cites, making sure I had my facts straight... it was a hassle trying to pin down some half-remembered dream.  I didn't make notes!  And anyway I know what the hell I'm talking about!

The thing about actually doing the research is that I rapidly found that, more often than I would like to admit, I didn't.  But more than that, even when I am right, there's always something I didn't know, or something I forgot, to run across.  I like to teach, I like to lecture, not because it gives me a feeling of power or authority, but because it is an opportunity for me to learn.  I don't understand people who put down teachers, saying things like "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach".  More people should try it, is how I feel.  If I know something, or if I love something, I want to pass that knowledge on, to share it.  Why wouldn't I?

All of that is a very long preamble to the latest incidental find of mine, the band Waitiki.  This is a difficult band to find anything on, because it's a common enough word, because looking them up brings up tiki bars and the better-known exotica act "The Waitiki 7".  I found them because a song on their second album, "Rendezvous in Okonkuluku", contains a track titled "Cave of the Tarpon".  Well, I don't know from Tarpon; I was just looking to see if I could dig up a bootleg of the soundtrack, which was at some past point featured on Aquarium Drunkard, but the links were dead.

The track titles intrigued me enough for me to give it a listen, and I liked what I heard.  "Exotica" has an uneasy legacy, because it is, in large part, music of exploitation.  Waitiki's track titles play with the myth of Hawaii, with the myth of "exotic" music.  The last track on the record is called "Haole Beach Sunset".  Their first album was called "Charred Mammal Flesh: Exotic Music for BBQ".

This, then, is music that foregrounds subversion, and this can be heard in the songs, which are short songs, with the arrangements one expects from "exotica", but takes these fairly regular twists into the truly bizarre.  The phrase that came to mind if "free exotica".  Or, perhaps, the exotica music of Sun Ra, something like "Watusa".

Well, look at that.  Waitiki, who are unknown to me beyond their name... looking them up on Discogs shows them as being credited on the 2019 record by The Barrence Whitfield Soul Savage Orchestra, "Songs From the Sun Ra Cosmos".  And they do "I'm Gonna Unmask The Batman".  Barrence Whitfield - birth name "Barry White", which he changed for some reason when he took up professionally singing - is another new name to me.  He put out two records with Tom Russell in 1993, "Hillbilly Voodoo" and "Cowboy Mambo".

Do your research.  I never would have found any of this if I hadn't.