He’s one of pop’s great technological disruptors. But the AI era fills him with anxiety

This iterative, memetic layering of cultures, often with technology, has been a through line of Hosono’s entire career. Born in 1947, Hosono grew up in post-WWII Japan, after nuclear devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when US popular culture worked its way off military bases and into Japanese life.

“My mother is no longer with us; it’s been about five or six years now. She really loved Hollywood movies and music, and I was heavily influenced by that. From a young age she would play movie soundtracks for me. Her idol was Fred Astaire. I watched those movies a lot as I grew older. My father probably liked it, too; he even said he wanted to be a dancer because of my mother’s influence. That’s the kind of person my mother was. I’m very grateful,” says Hosono.

Happy End was a Japanese approximation of American roots rock. Next, as a solo artist, Hosono began a reflexive reappropriation of 1950s exotica records on his albums Tropical Dandy, Bon Voyage co. and Paraiso, the album on which he first worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi. The three men became Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan’s most influential band, whose first major hit in 1978 was a subversive synth-pop cover reclaiming the “oriental” melody of the 1959 exotica recording Firecracker by Martin Denny.

Hosono pioneered the use of electronic instruments with his YMO bandmates – each hugely influential solo musicians, producers, session musicians and composers in their own right – and Japanese popular music became increasingly dominated by electronic compositions in the wake of YMO’s peak 1970s and 1980s popularity. Some middle-aged Japanese businessmen still sport the group’s “techno cut” undercut hairstyle.

The first record Hosono bought as a boy was a version of Mon Oncle by the Japanese singer Jun Nakajima, taken from Jacques Tati’s film of the same name. The film is a comedic account of one man’s struggle at confronting modernity and technology – a prophetic first purchase for a pioneering technologist with his own questions about today’s technological advancements.

“For Jacques Tati I think there was some irony in how things would break down, but now we have entered an era where it is no longer a carefree matter. After all, with the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, moving into the 20th century from the age of oil, machines began to work so that human workers didn’t have to use their muscles,” says Hosono.