Frances Morgan : The power of pop

Reviews Julian Cope, Japrocksampler: How the Postwar Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock'n'Roll (Bloomsbury), at New Statesman (06.09.2007) :

The Japan of Julian Cope's Japrocksampler often feels like a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of the counterculture emerging elsewhere at the time. Of course, with its island status, unfamiliar alphabet and the perceived twin motifs of advanced technology and ancient ritual, there is always the danger of Japanese culture being uncritically lauded as mysterious and "extreme", or dismissed either as impenetrably obscure or a laughable imitation of western forms. With Cope as guide, however, readers are in safe hands. A wayward, Iggy Pop-like pop star in the 1980s and 1990s, both solo and with the Liverpool post-punk band the Teardrop Explodes, Cope has written a brilliantly funny, insightful autobiography, Krautrocksampler, a definitive study of Germany's "Krautrock" movement, and two lavishly produced field guides to the Neolithic sites of UK and Europe.

Selected bands have a chapter apiece, but many have stories crying out for whole books. Alongside hijacked planes, guitar feedback, anarchic festivals and nude biking, J A Caesar's journey from wandering yakuza associate and "futen number one" to avant-garde composer writing scores for the controversial playwright Shuji Terayama is an intriguing tale of beat poetry, extreme sounds and feverish creativity, perhaps best encapsulated in the title of Terayama's iconic work Throw Away the Books, Let's Go Into the Streets. Meanwhile, the story of Taj Mahal Travellers' more gentle but no less extreme penchant for playing in unusual environments, using home-made instruments and "voices, stones and bamboo winds", reads like a Zen road movie.

What is "a Zen road movie" ? Have you seen it ?