Tropical Dandy moves the tropics from the map into a record's imagination.
Tropical usually identifies a place; dandy first identifies a manner. Haruomi Hosono joins them in Tropical Dandy, as though geography has been given a carefully chosen jacket. Released on June 25, 1975, the album opens with “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and proceeds to titles including “Kinukaidō,” “Peking Duck,” and “Hyōryūki.” Train, road, food, drifting: the result is not a practical travel guide. It proposes that different kinds of experience can occupy the same table, and that records can rearrange the world without first reducing it to a single local color.
That arrangement also makes exotic a word worth questioning. Unfamiliar to whom? Who is looking, and who supplies the names? English and Japanese titles beside one another make a single stable viewing position less easy to assume. The album can be approached as imaginative transportation, involving both distant nouns and the intervals Hosono places between them. Vehicles and dishes enter the musical vocabulary together. Grand travel acquires the proportions of everyday life and comedy; the solemn explorer is no longer the only possible figure in the picture.
“Honey Moon” and “Sanji no Komori Uta” bring the scale back toward intimacy and rest. The latter also appears in an instrumental version within the original program, allowing the same material to change its manner of appearing. The journey need not keep expanding outward. It can return to a room, an hour, or the body. Departure and staying, a sung piece and a version without the vocal, have places within one album. Their coexistence gives the imagined space more than one direction of movement.
On a contemporary city-pop map, Tropical Dandy can easily become an arrow pointing toward some later, supposedly mature style. An arrow is often in too much of a hurry to notice what is beside the road. More rewarding is Hosono's way of making categories surrender a little authority: a place becomes a title, a manner becomes a climate, and drifting can be well dressed. The record need not establish a single origin for everything that followed. It is already a complete form of curiosity, folding a map into a sleeve while allowing the world outside the folds to remain.