Julian Cope's "Japrocksampler" book
 

Japrocksampler: How the post-war Japanese blew their minds on rock ‘n’ roll, by Julian Cope

Available 3 Sep 2007 (subject to change).

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 9780747589457

Julian Cope, eccentric and visionary rock musician, hip archaeologist and one time frontman of Teardrop Explodes, follows the runaway underground success of his book Krautrocksampler with Japrocksampler, a cult deconstruction of Japanese rock music.

Japrocksampler reveals what really happened when East met West after World War Two and the mayhem that ensued … and is a must for anybody interested in modern music and Japanese culture. It explores the clash between traditional, conservative Japanese values and the wild rock ‘n’ roll renegades of the 1960s and 70s and tells the tale of six seminal groups of artists in Japanese post-war culture, from itinerant art-house poets to violent refusenik rock groups with a penchant for plane hijacking. The book concludes with enticing reviews of Julian’s Top 50 Jap Rock albums.

www.bloomsbury.com

Got this month's copy of 'Wire' then?

Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer

Twelve years ago Julian Cope published his celebrated celebration of 1970s German cosmic rock. Passionate, pithy, and portable, Krautrocksampler was wittily styled as a pocket-sized field guide along the lines of the Observer Book of Birds. It quickly became a cult item and was widely credited for kick-starting the Nineties boom of interest in Krautrock (something of an over-estimation, given that groups like Stereolab had long been citing Neu! et al). Now here comes Copey with a sort-of-sequel, this time exploring and exalting the even more esoteric world of Japanese freak rock.

Krautrocksampler and Japrocksampler are decidedly different, however. Although it contained lots of little-known information, the earlier book didn't belabour the back story but focused on Cope's rabid enthusiasm for the music. His ultra-vivid and hilariously over-the-top descriptions of a legion of German post-psychedelic records suggested that this prolific musician (he's just released his umpteenth solo album, You Gotta Problem With Me) might have missed his true vocation as a Lester Bangs-style advocate.

Japrocksampler is a far more substantial work, for better and for worse. It's a heavier book (more than twice the page count of Krautrocksampler) and heavier-going, too. Especially early on, there's a self-conscious air of scholarship. Context-setting is just dandy, but was it really necessary to start with the 1853 arrival of US vessels on Japanese shores, thereby ending centuries of cultural isolationism? (The Krautrocksampler equivalent would be kicking off with the Franco-Prussian War!)

Was Cope maybe piqued into overcompensation by that smatter of niggardly experts who complained that Krautrocksampler wasn't comprehensive or authoritative enough? Or did he just develop a taste for research while working on his highly-regarded 'stone circle' histories The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European? Either way, a certain windy ponderousness of phrase and tone creeps into the prose now and then, suggestive less of long hair and loon pants than of donnish tweed and leather-patched elbows. In the introduction, the word 'study' crops up repeatedly, including the assertion that a 'detailed study of this book will have you rethinking your attitudes to music, art, time... indeed life itself'. Presumptuous, moi?

Fortunately, the story itself is sufficiently fascinating and untold to keep the reader gripped. Japrocksampler divides into two parts. The first, really a prequel to the book proper, deals with the 1960s, with chapters examining Japanese experimental music (a scene hugely impacted by musique concrete, with Yoko Ono and her erstwhile composer-hubby Toshi Ichiyanagi prominent among the cast of characters), the 'Eleki' craze for Shadows-style twangy instrumental rock, and the 'Group Sounds' movement (suit-wearing Japbands modelled on the British beat boom). Part two plunges us into the era of freaks, aka futen, with chapters on Flower Travellin' Band, Taj Mahal Travelers, and Speed, Glue & Shinki, among others. All have become prized by Western record collector fiends this past decade, especially now the Kraut Kosmiche seam has been mined beyond exhaustion.

Les Rallizes Denudes are the biggest cults of the lot, and my inner cynic can't help wondering if that's because they never made a studio album (an abortive attempt saw leader/guitarist Takeshi Mizutani mortified by his feeble vocals) but instead left an endless spoor of live bootlegs (hard-to-find being a huge turn-on for the collector community). In parallel to the way Amon Duul were involved in Germany's commune-dwelling counterculture and allegedly had ties to Baader-Meinhof, one member of Les Rallizes Denudes participated in the Japanese Red Army's 1970 hi-jacking of a Boeing 721. Strangely, though, Cope doesn't make much of the parallels between Krautrock and Japrock: two Axis powers whose postwar youth revolted against their nations' tarnished pasts and embraced Anglo-American pop culture in its most undisciplined and 'decadently' anti-fascist form. One larger idea he does grapple with is the Japanese talent for mimesis. Most of the individual bands Cope writes about have a specific Western precursor/model. Often it's a distinctly unpromising looking one, like those proto-metal one-trick ponies Blue Cheer (with Les Rallizes Denudes) or the bleedin' Moody Blues (with the Far East Family Band). Cope argues that the West-to-East translation process creates 'a peculiar copy of the original,' a wrongness that in some instances allows the Japanese version to surpass its inspiration.

If Cope's exaltation of Les Rallizes Denudes seems like mystique-building covering up simple underachievement (he hails the hermetic, retired Mizutani as 'this great nihilistic spirit, this sonic executioner'), elsewhere his evocations of all this authentically inauthentic music are enticing and convincing. He raves about the 'fascinating and wildly eventful' multi-generic pastiches created by theatre score composer JA Caesar (mostly only released as cassettes sold at stalls in the theatres), and the bizarre jazz-rock tangents spawned out of the Japanese cast of Hair

Shedding the 'proper historian, me' persona, his true voice breaks loose with the closing section, his all-time Top 50 Japrock LPs. This consumer advice is the fruit of much labour and expense, Cope reveals, the sifting process being 'an arduously hit-and-miss affair... I've spent a fortune buying Japanese stuff because it has a great jacket'. There's also a brief addendum on must-to-avoid clunkers, Cope astutely noting how collectors gull themselves to feel better about having shelled out so much dough, starting an inflationary cycle whereby 'deadly rare foreign albums often become classed as classics merely because no one outside an elite few has even heard [them]'.

There are moments in Japrocksampler that will make more sceptical readers wonder if that very syndrome isn't going on in Cope's own text. But for the most part, the book persuades you there's reams and realms of triptastic Japanese music that deserve the wider world's ear.

No - I've been hyping this for months in other threads, and I thought I may as well start a proper thread now that the publishing date is getting closer.

Is there something about it in there? A review, presumably?

Read that Observer article t'other day. Also mentioned in another thread. Rubbish review, but even so I might end my moratorium on books about 20th-century music to get this. What a pirck, eh?

can't wait, i need my paycheck.

I could have really really used one of these about ten years ago, but I'm definitely gonna buy this anyway. Plenty more to learn yet!

sure, the description makes it look more like an extended, researched essay than a source of information, but still...

Yes. haven't read the review yet but I recognised the cover. Just like me to be looking at the pictures!:D

the book looks pretty good, even if that observer reviewer does seem like a bit of an idiot, denoting that the (relative) popularity of les rallizes denudes relies on their obscurity and the elitist tendencies of record collectors.....

Which would be fair comment if Rallizes weren't incredibly good. There's a good point made about collectors equating obscure with good, but this is frustratingly not true at all with what I've heard of Rallizes. Taj Mahal Travellers, maybe...

Don't talk smack about Taj Mahal Travellers.

You heard something that wasn't dire by them?

Several hours' worth.
Same goes for "Catch Wave" by Traveller Takehisa Kosugi.
And kindred spirits East Bionic Symphonia.

Kosugi I'm enormously fond of. I can't download anything to this computer, but I'll badger you to change my mind about Taj Mahal when I can Mr C.

Edit: Incidentally, d'you know of any available recordings of catch-wave? Saw Kosugi doing it a couple of years ago and haven't found any recordings since.

I have that on vinyl; it was re-issued maybe 6 (?) years ago and I was able to get it then.
I'm sure there is an expensive import digital version floating out there somewhere as well.

Edit:
There is!
My super-limited vinyl was even far cheaper than this.
Whoa-ho.
http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/...LP+Sleeve).htm

Hmm. Possibly a bit out of my budget. I have my eyes on other records at the moment. But, potentially, might be worth getting.

although normally i would be very keen to read a book about japanese rock, i'm put off by a few factors, the annoyingness of julian cope, apparently cope has a strong dislike for all things haino and has excluded him from thew book, the self-importance that i suspected would be manifest in the prose and that suspicion being confirmed by the observer review, plus, the annoyingness of julian cope.

taj mahal travellers aren't too bad, i picked up a recent reissue of "July 15" which wasn't terribly exciting but couldn't find anything else. however, i do LOVE east bionic symphonia but then that's getting into fluxus/free improvisation and further away from rock n roll so i doubt the book will cover that in too great a detail...
i wonder why cope has a dislike for haino? to me, fushitsusha even sounds a bit krautrocky in places, so i'd be surprised if they didn't make an appearance at all in the book (as the author has already written a book on kraut). if it is true then it's pretty fucking pathetic to exclude him. i wonder how can you write a comprehensive commentary on the underground of 70s japanese rock music sans haino? beats me.
i know i've said this before, but i really wish someone would translate masimi akita's book into english.

hmmm...actually, taj mahal travellers are quite amazing.