This displacement of time and magnificence is on the core of Hosono’s music, and is an extension of what appeals to him about exotica. (“It’s enjoyable the way it feels phony,” he mentioned in 2020.) However past a giddy penchant for experimentation, he repeatedly complicates easy genuine/inauthentic dichotomies and notions of directional affect. “Hurricane Dorothy” is called after John Ford’s 1937 journey movie The Hurricane—a couple of Polynesian sailor who will get imprisoned—and its lead actress Dorothy Lamour. He sings concerning the girl’s qualities as concurrently Caribbean, Arabian, and Slavic, recognizing that false illustration is simple to swallow when it stays within the realm of need. Musically, it’s an up to date tackle Denny’s personal exotica, however it additionally stands as a continuation of Hosono’s work in Comfortable Finish and Caramel Mama (later generally known as Tin Pan Alley). This was not simply Hollywood nostalgia, however Japan’s personal utopic artificiality.
Hosono wasn’t the one one making music like this in Japan. Makoto Kubota, who seems on the album and impressed its title (he referred to as Hosono the titular phrase), launched Hawaii Champroo in 1975. The LP was co-produced by Hosono and maintained a seamless, tonally constant mix of Hawaiian, American, and Okinawan music. And whereas Tropical Dandy is purposeful in its genre-blending, it might probably really feel like a novelty with songs like “Peking Duck,” which encompasses a Brazilian rhythm, spurts of pentatonic melodies, and lyrics about Yokohama’s Chinatown and Singin’ within the Rain. Hosono’s music is just a little miracle on this manner, honoring the truth that concepts—musical and in any other case—are all the time circulating, mutating, and inevitably rendered as approximations. When the Peking Opera-style singing seems on the in any other case folk-rock tune “Kinukaido,” it feels much less like a mocking insult—examine it with Mighty Sparrow’s take the yr prior—than an exaltation of the hole between the actual and fraudulent. This isn’t as a result of Hosono is shamelessly ignorant, however as a result of he is aware of that music is inherently private, and that one’s personal experiences are a prism for everybody else’s—why attempt to disguise that?
Essentially the most beautiful observe on Tropical Dandy thrives on such transparency. The spare, light samba rhythm on “Honey Moon” is dotted with tender hints of metal pan. Hosono’s band makes use of synths and guitars to simulate the instrument’s timbre, however it’s not fairly proper—and higher for it. Getting a mere style of those vibrant, chiming sounds leaves a yearning for the real factor, which all the time feels inside attain. However as he sings about swaying hair and relishing the twilight, the metallic sounds begin to crumble. Hosono understands that exotica is all about dangling the impossibly, ostensibly actual in entrance of you, making a eager for one thing you’ve by no means recognized. He says as a lot on the gorgeously easy “Sanji no Komori Uta,” the place he talks about placing on an previous file and singing a tune—a routine that serves as his lullaby. That’s all music ever is: a gateway to your desires.
