Exotica

Exotica is a lounge music style that hit its peak in the United States during the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, popular mainly with the generation that had come of age during World War II (Exotica, n.d.). AllMusic describes it as a form of easy-listening lounge music that draws on world music, but the goal was never to accurately recreate those traditions. The goal was lightweight entertainment, taking recognizable ethnic sounds and smoothing them into a digestible pop package (AllMusic, n.d.-f). Picture a theme park version of the tropics. It borrows the palm trees and the drumbeats, but the "destination" itself is invented.

The genre gets its name from a specific 1957 record. Simon "Si" Waronker of Liberty Records coined the term "exotica" for Martin Denny's album of the same name, and that release, along with Les Baxter's earlier 1951 album Ritual of the Savage, became the templates that defined the style (Exotica, n.d.). Denny himself described his sound plainly, calling it a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient, or as he put it, what people imagined the islands to be like, admitting it was pure fantasy (Exotica, n.d.).

Musically, exotica leaned on lush orchestration built around percussion tied to whatever location it was evoking, things like congas, bongos, vibraphone, and Asian gongs, sometimes paired with the strange sound effects associated with space age pop (AllMusic, n.d.-f). The most popular regions it drew from were the Pacific, the Caribbean, Latin America, Brazil, and Africa, with Denny, Baxter, Esquivel, and Yma Sumac standing as the genre's major names (AllMusic, n.d.-f). Even during its heyday, exotica was often dismissed as cheesy and contrived, but a 1990s revival among alternative music fans brought it back, this time viewed partly with irony and partly with real appreciation (AllMusic, n.d.-f).

Sources:

AllMusic. (n.d.-f). Exotica music subgenre overview. https://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/exotica-ma0000002581
Exotica. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotica