Artists starting with Hoku

Hoku, “Another Dumb Blonde” (Geffen, 2000)
A lost classic from the golden age of 21st-century teenpop. Hoku was the daughter of Hawaiian-exotica crooner Don Ho, and this music – written by Antonio Armato and Tim James, who went on to fuel Disney’s teen-idol domination later in the decade – is its own kind of beach-pop utopia. Cotton-candy-fuzzed bubblegum-alternative guitars ride waves of rolling Britney-beats and synth-whooshes, with Hoku’s winsomely snarky vocals the perfect voice for a total-art-work that was to the early ‘00s what the Beach Boys were to the early ‘60s. The sound of kids reveling in a seemingly endless summer, just before the hammer of history came down hard.
Try 1, 3, 7
11/10/16