In the 1950s and 60s, Japanese cinema was about as cool as could be in the West. Starting with Kurosawa's Rashomon, film lovers and critics in North American and Europe pounced on the movies coming out of Japan. The charge was led by regular film critics, people who knew cinema but had no particular knowledge of Japan--folks like Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Francois Truffaut, Paul Schrader, etc.

Then, in the 1970s and 80s, Japan Studies experts (people like me, that is) got hold of it. We put Japanese film into its proper historical and cultural context, explained it exhaustively within the linguistic and literary traditions of Japan, defined it as a properly national cinema. And as a result, Japanese film went deader than a doorknob.....

This unhappy history came to mind recently as I read Julian Cope's Japrocksampler, a book with a subtitle that tells it all: How the Post-War Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock 'N' Roll. Cope knows nothing about Japan, but he knows his rock and roll, and he likes it. It's a passionate work, clearly based on obsessive research and grounded in a quirky but well-defined aesthetic. Cope is addicted to unruly underground rock from the 1970s, the louder and harsher the better, and he's paintstakingly reconstructed the situation out of which it arose: the avant-garde art scene of Tokyo in the early 1960s, the commercial pop of the ereki and Group Sounds booms, and the late 1960s street culture that sprung up around Shinjuku Station and other hang-out spots.

Cope brilliantly accomplishes one of the primary tasks of a critic: he infects the reader with his passion. He's got me listening again to CDs I hadn't touched in years, as well as ordering some new ones from Japan that I just have to hear now that I've read Cope's take on them. As he admits more than once, he's more interested in mining the vein of myth than history, and so he centers his tale on a band of mythic heroes who can do no wrong: Uchida Yuya, producer Orita Ikuzo, guitarist Mizutani Kimio, and a few dozen others. Conversely, anyone who gets in their way is a fraud, a poseur, and hardly worth a listen. Uchida Yuya didn't like Happy End, so screw Happy End, etc.

As a result, of course, Cope overlooks a great deal of music that is in fact worth a listen. But he also reclaims from oblivion a large number of unduly obscure artists and records. The last section of the book consists of reviews of Cope's favorite fifty records from the genre, and rather than explore their historical lineage, he listens to them with a sharp musician's ear (Cope was the leader of Teardrop Explodes in the 1980s; I even interviewed him once back then) and then tells you what he hears, often in prose that is as bombastic as the sounds it describes.

The book is unfortunately riddled with errors: mistranscriptions of Japanese words and names, historical anachronisms, and wrong-headed generalizations about Japan. But don't worry: my own forthcoming book on postwar Japanese popular music will take care of that. I'll dot all of the i's and cross all of the t's--and probably kill off the joy just as ruthlessly as did my forebears in Japan film studies from the 1970s and 80s.

Cope will still be around then, still cranking up the volume on Flower Travellin' Band's Satori and dreaming of another land in another time. He'll still be hooking in new curiosity seekers, brave souls willing to seek out such eccentric wonders as the Taj Mahal Travelers, Far East Family Band, and Les Rallizes Denudes. And they will have their minds blown, right and proper, just like the postwar Japanese.

Less adventurous folks can simply wait until my book is published. I promise there will be no naked people on the cover.