Seventies records propose a geography that need not obey airline routes.
Open the track lists of Haruomi Hosono’s TROPICAL DANDY and Bon Voyage Co., also known as Taian Yoko, and geographical terms appear to be holding a rather unruly meeting. Beijing, Hong Kong, and Tokyo sit near tropical imagery, a steamship, and lullabies. Treated as travel instructions, these records might cause a missed flight. Treated as ways of naming pop music, they become more interesting. An album can bring distant places close without pretending to supply a reliable gazetteer.
The two records date from 1975 and 1976, with their sequences preserved in Crown’s catalog. Elsewhere, Hosono’s official biography places Happy End and YMO along his route. Such a career does not fold comfortably into a brochure advertising one uniform style. A rock band, a solo catalog, and electronic music can share participants without sharing every aesthetic purpose. His presence in a City Pop atlas is best understood as a road into neighboring histories.
The place names also preserve a worthwhile tension. Music can summon elsewhere without speaking on behalf of the people who live there. A city inside a title may first be creative material, an imagined sound world, or a cultural symbol. Listeners can enjoy that movement without mistaking an invented geography for a comprehensive account of actual places. Familiar and unfamiliar borrow from each other. Their boundaries need not disappear for the encounter to matter.
Hosono also encourages some modesty about genre. Classification can resemble the colored stickers a travel organizer hands out: useful for assembling a group, less useful as evidence that everyone wearing one has led the same life. A musician passing through different ensembles and projects can carry experience onward or change direction. Color every connection identically and the movement itself is the first thing lost.
The place names in Hosono’s work are therefore beginnings of questions rather than conclusions of a journey. Beijing and Hong Kong can become neighbors in a track list while a listener still asks what each name is doing there. Particular albums and collaborations give curiosity somewhere to settle, preventing imagined elsewhere from becoming an undifferentiated wash of color. Hosono’s pleasure lies partly in that openness: each record is specific enough to encounter without prescribing a single correct direction for the next.