Japrocksampler

[Mulboyne]

A commenter over on Click Opera has pointed out the publication of a new book by Julian Cope, former lead singer with British band The Teardrop Explodes and now full-time eccentric. "Japrocksampler" is described in this review as follows:

"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"

Here's one of his favourites, Les Rallizes Denudes, at a festival in 1976:

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[Mulboyne]

From another Guardian review:

....Central to Cope's thesis is the notion that mind-altering music can only be made by people who ingest mind-altering drugs, and that Japan's notoriously anti-drug culture therefore impeded the artistic development of its musical pioneers. With a mixture of aff ection and condescension, Cope relates the attempts of Japanese wannabe "refuseniks" (or even "uberrefuseniks") to ape the lifestyles of their American and British idols in a society where strict codes of honour still ruled and where the hippie musical Hair was closed down by the authorities. The oligarchical structure of the Japanese music business also meant that records - and the groups who played on them - were often put together by company bosses and producers. Cope astutely notes that for the Japanese, the entertainment industry was "a mythical hinterland wherein almost any opposing ideas could meet head-on", an environment where a singer could contribute to an avantgarde freakout while maintaining a parallel career crooning Perry Como ditties in a velvet tux.

Cope's descriptions are tantalising but no replacement for hearing the music itself, so the book's usefulness depends on whether it inspires you to rush off in search of such classics as Blind Baby Has Its Mothers Eyes by Les Rallizes Denudés or the eponymous album by Speed, Glue & Shinki. Less adventurous readers may simply enjoy the anecdotes about a host of chancers, mad idealists, Buddhist gangsters, Monkees clones ("Are We Not Crazy Cats? No, We Are Spiders!") and bonafide geniuses. The Taj Mahal Travellers hit the road in their rune-inscribed Volkswagen minibus, searching for windswept beaches where they can provide musical accompaniment to the waves at dawn. A young Yoko Ono attempts suicide in frustration at being upstaged by her first husband Toshi. Experimental violinist Takehisa Kosugi takes time out from the avant-garde to compose music for the children's cartoon series Atom Boy. All human life is here, somewhat mangled in translation.

As a music commentator, Cope is passionately opinionated, which is both his strength and his weakness. His lack of affinity with folk or the subtler forms of jazz causes him to ignore or sideline many of Japan's most distinctive artists. What he's looking for is "the kind of unsignposted music with neither peaks nor troughs that still sounds relevant today", ie music that resembles Krautrock. The way he tells it, his psychedelic renegades were central to the violent unrest that gripped Japan in the late 1960s, whereas in fact most of the clashes were between riot police and an army of Dylanesque protest singers. But in a book as over-amplified as this, acoustic guitars don't register.

Japrocksampler is by turns hilarious, wearisome, fascinating and obtuse. Behind its showbiz gossip and shamanistic mythmaking, we catch glimpses of another Japan, a Japan that eludes understanding. The incident where sword-waving members of Japan's Red Army Faction (including the bass player of the Radical Music Black Gypsy Band) hijack a plane "to Cuba", eventually landing to a heroes' welcome in North Korea, is retold as a wacky caper, but the complex griefs and tensions that led to such gestures cry out for deeper analysis.

As a work of scholarship, Japrocksampler is slapdash and error-strewn. But at this early, naïve stage of our appreciation of Japanese rock music, perhaps it hardly matters. Other books on the subject are not on off er. Alan Cummings, the most knowledgeable (and bilingual) British scholar of Japanese alternative music, writes articles for the Wire but has not yet written a stand-alone text. Japanese Independent Music, issued in 1998 by Sonore (a French publisher ) is out of print. For that matter, Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler is out of print too. The sad truth is that very few people are interested in unusual "foreign" sounds. In our megastore marketplace, the familiar is endlessly recycled, while blinkered journalists reshuffle the same Top 100 lists ad nauseam. Japrocksampler is a flawed but welcome reminder that there are musical worlds beyond our ken...

[bizarrejapan]

I just ordered the book 3 days ago, still waiting to come.. looks promising.

[Mulboyne]

I picked up a copy yesterday. Julian Cope's autobiography, "Head-On" was a very good read so I'm hoping he brings some of that energy to this book.

The early pages indicate that this will be of as much interest to people who like to see how Japan gets portrayed by overseas writers as it will be to those who want to know about the music.

Cope notes at the beginning that it has become increasingly common for Japanese names to be rendered surname first in English writing (not sure that's true) but defends his decision to put the surname last on the grounds that Yoko Ono plays a central role in his narrative and it would be too precious to start calling her Ono Yoko now.

One of the reasons he gives for writing the book is the paucity of information in English which he largely puts down to the challenge of the written language. This leads him into a broader defence of his approach which is worth quoting in full.

Indeed, the alphabet barrier has been the main stumbling block in making any comprehensive study of Japanese music. For the poor Western author must rely on hearsay and the personal knowledge of a few elite Westerners whose experiences of Japanese culture - through their work, marriage to a Japanese, part-Japanese heritage and so forth - will see them set up as oracles of a kind purely because no one can unlock the information without first unlocking the alphabet. For our truth-seeking purposes, those "Nipponised" Westerners are not trustworthy commentators, for they have a vested interest in keeping mystery to themselves, enabling them to magnify the talents of their own particular favourite artists simply by not referencing those that fall outside their own personal taste.

So let me make this clear from the get-go: although I don't claim to be any less subjective about the music contained within this book (having performed onstage with Acid Mothers Temple and members of Boris), readers can - through the large body of work of work that have published on other subjects - trust that I am by no means a Japanophile or anything like. But while I am not setting out to whiten Japan's sepulchre, neither will I use this book as a platform to bash particular aspects of Japanese culture. There are many things about Japan that I do not enjoy or even approve of, but here is certainly not the place to snipe at or overly criticize its culture.

I'm looking forward to this.

[Mulboyne]

Julian Cope has a website now for the book. It has a large number of band profiles which don't appear in the print edition. I can see a few errors along the way but it's not a bad effort for an enthusiast who can't read or speak Japanese.

[Mulboyne]

Yomiuri Review: Japanese musical freakology

...Cope provides an opinionated history of Japan's musical revolutions in the 1960s. He looks at how Japan became a hotbed of experimental music through the efforts of such artists as Toshi Ichiyanagi and the Tokyo-based improvisational ensemble Group Ongaku. He recounts how The Ventures jump-started the Eleki craze with their electric guitar-driven instrumentals, and how the Beatles set off the Group Sounds boom and served as the model for its wildly popular groups such the Tigers and the Spiders. After this enthusiastically if not always carefully researched preamble, Cope devotes a chapter each to his favorite Japanese groups. Cope's criteria for musical excellence is unconventional to say the least and is largely based on a band's potential for freaking out normal people and its commitment to ear-splitting volume and hallucinogenic substances...

...For all of its merits, it must be said that Japrocksampler is rather sloppily written and edited. There are a number of misspellings and factual errors, and Cope has a bad habit of repeating himself. There is also the problem of the author's assertion that his "great love of Japanese music is partly due to the interplay of the lyrics, and the manner in which the imagery works on multiple levels." Considering that he neither speaks nor reads Japanese, this claim is simply hard to take seriously. Ultimately, though, Japrocksampler is a very welcome book on an overlooked byway of rock 'n' roll. Like the music under discussion, it's loud, a little abrasive and a whole lotta fun.

[Mulboyne]

Since Cope's book came out, enough interest has grown in his main recommendation, Les Rallizes Denudes, for the label Ignuitas to re-release some of their hard-to-find recordings. Here's Pitchfork's review of Eve Night:

...Many of their available releases are the worst of bootleg tripe: badly recorded college campus shows taken from the deck of an amateur sound engineer. But Eve Night is of particular interest because it's cut of a different sort than those back-alley CD-Rs. The set, recorded at a Housei University show in 1983, is a good recording that catches the group on a damn good night. It's easier to hear the dynamic interplay between widely disparate vocals, rhythm, guitar, and bass than, say, Eve Night's concurrently re-issued 1974 companion, Are You Rallizesed? The jams, which sometimes range over twenty minutes in length, tend to initially bear some resemblance to the 1960s California sound...but the heavy machinations of Les Rallizes bear more in common with their hard-psych contemporaries Hawkwind.

Eve Night is a wonderful document of the group not only because it's so clear, but because it catches the subtleties of their range, which is sometimes hard to hear in low-quality bootlegs. Singer Takashi Mizutani is never spectacular, and he often seems to be trying to be less than spectacular, but on cuts like their famous dirges "Enter the Mirror" and "The Last One", he affects the voice of a lonely, wandering spirit in the throes of an existential revelation. As counterpoint, LRD's superbly fuzzy guitar lead is the mark of a group that has transcended the blues, transcended drugs, and after sixteen years, remains in an impressionistic prime. Ignuitas, the label that issued Eve Night, is similarly enigmatic. They don't have much in the way of PR, and their liner notes are frustratingly minimalist, but they've been releasing some great live LRD live shows for the last couple years. Perhaps the best thing about Eve Night is that it advances Stateside availability of LRD source material.

[Ptyx]

I just got one of the last copy of Japanese Independent Music, the sonore book published in 2001. It consists of some introductory essayss and then a big non-exhaustive, non-ojective list of japanese indie bands.
It's pretty good considering that there was no other books available at the time. Also some of the essays at the beginning were written by japanese musicians.
The thing with those books is that mostly they emphasize the bands that are somewhat famous in the west. So they talk at large about Ruins, Acid Mothers Temple, Keiji Haino and the Boredoms but they often forgot to mention that those bands are almost unknown in Japan and have no influence whatsoever on the japanese more mainstream indies.
As much as i like those bands, those are the underground of the underground here, except for the Boredoms maybe.

So it's all about the fucked up freaked out bands not so much about independant japanese rock music.
It's like a book about american rock that would only talk about the influence of John Zorn, Sun City Girls and Smegma.
I'm still waiting for a book that accuretely tell the story of mainstream japanese rock, even if it might not be as interesting music wise, it would
be more accurate regarding what japanese people actually listen to. I want someone to explain the popularity of a band like Happy End for example.