Here is the entire history of pop Los Angeles in all its splendor and excess. The shadow land of expectation; the dazzling white-hot spotlight. No city in the western world exerts such a fascination as the damned paradise of Los Angeles. Barney Hoskyns has spent the better half of a decade researching this definitive account of a dysfunctional artistic community.

From the days of the thriving jazz clubs in the forties to the menace of West Coast gangsta rap in the nineties, the sound of this bleached, irrigated dreamscape is here in all its warped glory. Hoskyns journeys through fifty years of music history to unravel its unrealities. The result is a riveting account of, as he writes, "the peculiarly California interplay between light and darkness, good and evil." He explores the two-faced nature of Orpheus' brain-children: innocence and sin, fantasy and reality. California, even in its most profound sense, conjures up fantasy: vast geographical distances, sun, smog, and hedonism all conveniently huddled on the Pacific Coast.

But underneath all this suntan lotion and the sizzling backyard barbies lies a nervous creative energy and downright weirdness that manufactures and promotes the fantasy in musical forms catering to heartland America. The music of Southern California has kept us all waiting for the sun.