This displacement of time and elegance 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 stated in 2020.) However past a giddy penchant for experimentation, he repeatedly complicates easy genuine/inauthentic dichotomies and notions of directional affect. “Hurricane Dorothy” is known as after John Ford’s 1937 journey movie The Hurricane—a few Polynesian sailor who will get imprisoned—and its lead actress Dorothy Lamour. He sings concerning the lady’s qualities as concurrently Caribbean, Arabian, and Slavic, recognizing that false illustration is straightforward to swallow when it stays within the realm of want. Musically, it’s an up to date tackle Denny’s personal exotica, but it surely additionally stands as a continuation of Hosono’s work in Pleased Finish and Caramel Mama (later often called Tin Pan Alley). This was now 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 includes a Brazilian rhythm, spurts of pentatonic melodies, and lyrics about Yokohama’s Chinatown and Singin’ within the Rain. Hosono’s music is somewhat miracle on this approach, 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 music “Kinukaido,” it feels much less like a mocking insult—examine it with Mighty Sparrow’s take the 12 months prior—than an exaltation of the hole between the true 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 attractive monitor 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, but it surely’s not fairly proper—and higher for it. Getting a mere style of those brilliant, chiming sounds leaves a longing 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 identified. He says as a lot on the gorgeously simple “Sanji no Komori Uta,” the place he talks about placing on an previous report and singing a music—a routine that serves as his lullaby. That’s all music ever is: a gateway to your goals.
