Abstract
Is Krautrock actually susceptible to meaningful definition? On this point, some of the contributors to this book differ: its editor, Uwe Schütte, argues that Krautrock ‘cannot be defined effectively as the product of specific German political, economic, historical, and cultural specifics’ (p. 8), while Jeff Hayton insists that Krautrock ‘certainly had a time and a place, emerging in the late 1960s in West Germany and reaching its musical apex in the following decade’ (p. 250). Yet there is no disagreement about what has been called (by David Buckley) its ideology, i.e. ‘wanting to create a uniquely German pop culture after those decades post-World War II when Anglo-American culture was pre-eminent’ (cited by Alex Harden in his concluding chapter, p. 294). According to Ralf Hütter, ‘We woke up in the late ‘60s and realised that Germany had become an American colony’; or, as one of the characters remarks in Wim Wenders’s film Im Lauf der Zeit (1976), ‘The Yanks have colonised our subconscious’ (cited p. 2). And whether it is a German phenomenon or a British perception of a German phenomenon (cf. pp. 51 and 250), the sound of Krautrock is easily identifiable – represented for many by arguably one of its most iconic examples, the Düsseldorf-based band Kraftwerk – and was first critically investigated by the British post-punk rocker Julian Cope in his Krautrocksampler: (1995), whose subtitle (Guide to the Great Kosmische Music) includes another designation for this musical style. (Ironically, as Alexander Carpenter notes, little of Cope’s own music reflects the influence of Krautrock (p. 263).)
Ulrich Adelt offers what is probably the most all-encompassing definition of Krautrock as ‘a catch-all term for the music of various West German rock groups of the 1970s that blended influences of African American and Anglo-American music with the experimental and electronic music of European composers’, many of whose bands ‘arose out of the West German student counterculture and connected leftist political activism with experimental rock music and, later, electronic sounds’ (p. 16). (He also reminds us that the German word Kraut has less to do with pickled cabbage and more to do with herbs or weeds, not to mention drugs . . .). To get to grips with the aesthetics of Krautrock, Adelt introduces a number of critical concepts: replacing the notion of ‘genre’ with the concept of ‘discursive formulation’ derived from Foucault, drawing on Josh Kun’s notion of ‘audiotopias’ (whereby music itself is understood as a spatial practice), and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of ‘de-’ and ‘re-territorialization’ – the former relating to Krautrock’s negation of the nation-state and its playful engagement with an ‘international or cosmic non-German Germanness’, and the latter to its ‘globalisation’, thanks to non-Germans identifying with a ‘transformed and transmogrified Germanness’ (pp. 23–5). (In his introduction, Schütte suggests a link between Ralf Hütter’s call for Zukunftsmusik and Richard Wagner’s notion of ‘future music’, and intriguingly connects Krautrock with Ernst Bloch’s conception of music as ‘a toolkit for utopian thinking’ (pp. 10–11).)
Detlef Siegfried argues that Krautrock cannot be understood without the context of the upheaval of the radical politics of 1968 and, in particular, the festivals at Waldeck Castle and the Internationale Essener Songtage organised and promoted by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. As Alexander Simmeth shows, the British music press was often preoccupied with Krautrock’s perceived ‘Germanness’, and he suggests that the accusation of being ‘aggressively Teutonic’ sometimes levelled at Amon Düül II’s performances expresses that sense of proximity between the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk and Kraftwerk’s music, design, and performances of the late 1970s (p. 49). Jan-Peter Herbst investigates the different ways in which the ‘Berlin School’ of electronic music and the ‘Düsseldorf School’ of electronic pop were supported financially by the infrastructure of the German music business, while Heather Moore offers an appreciative analysis of the actual sounds of Krautrock, exploring how its work displays the characteristics of ‘machine rock’ (embracing kineticism and motion) and ‘oceanic rock’ (embodying stasis and expansive spaces) (p. 83). In so doing, she makes a strong case for seeing Krautrock in relation to those experimental styles of the mid-twentieth century that explore tape music and sampling (Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti) or use repetition, modular forms, and drones (including such minimalist composers as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass) (p. 88).
At the heart of this Companion lie nine chapters examining the Krautrock bands themselves: Kraftwerk (Schütte), Can (Patrick Glen), Tangerine Dream (Sean Nye and Michael Krikorian), Neu! (David Stubbs), Faust (Alexander Henkle), Cluster/Harmonia (David Pattie), Popol Vuh (Sascha Seiler), Ash Ra Tempel, Manuel Göttsching, and Klaus Schulze (Pertti Grönholm), and Amon Düül II (Ryan Iseppi). Here, each contributor has useful insights to offer, whether it is Henkle’s apt characterization of Faust’s ambition as being to find ‘a specifically German approach to inject the established rock mythos with avant-garde experimentation, mixing noise, and radical aesthetics within a Romantic-Dada spirit’ (p. 158) or Pattie’s analysis of the changes to the work of the avant-garde electronic group Cluster and the related group Harmonia arising from their musicians’ decision to settle in the rural idyll of Forst in Lower Saxony, sometimes going into the granular detail of specific tracks. Yet, while most contributors rightly emphasise Krautrock’s musical innovativeness, Jens Balzer makes a powerful case for seeing it as a highly conservative movement, arguing it was almost exclusively dominated by white, heterosexual men with an upper-middle-class background, and often sought to cultivate and reappropriate German cultural traditions (reflected in the choice of such band names as Hölderlin, Novalis, and Ougenweide).
Finally, in examining the legacy of Krautrock, Jeff Hayton traces the evolution of punk as it developed in West Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s and its connections to Krautrock, noting that the generation against which punks were revolting was precisely the ’68ers (although surely not only them); Alexander Carpenter explores how, despite its ‘Teutonic heaviness’, the experimental aesthetic and anti-rock ethos of Krautrock helped shape the sound of British post-punk music; and in a fascinating chapter, Marcus Barnes investigates how Krautrock transcended Germany’s borders and (so to speak) travelled from Düsseldorf to Detroit and its musical nightclub scene of house, techno, hip-hop, etc., via the influence of free jazz. According to Mike Banks, Kraftwerk’s key track Nummern is nothing less than ‘the secret code of electronic funk’: it was ‘the perfect urban music because it was controlled chaos, and that’s exactly what we live in’ (cited p. 290).
This remark clearly hints at Krautrock’s continuing relevance today, as does another aspect. For Barnes argues that the notion of ‘universal funk’ pervades Krautrock and the music it inspired, suggesting it shows how, ‘beyond superficial physical identity such as gender, nationality, racial categorisation, and other such limiting signifiers of identity, music is a vehicle for the human experience’ (p. 291). In this sense, then, Krautrock fully deserves the label of kosmische Musik that Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser introduced in the 1970s, and this confirms the link drawn – perhaps surprisingly – by Schütte in his introduction between the astral metaphor found in Arnold Schönberg’s string quartet no. 2, op. 10 (with its incorporation of a line from the poem Entrücking by the Symbolist poet Stefan George and its reference to ‘air from another planet’) and the ambition of Krautrock to produce music that is truly kosmisch, experimenting with ‘previously unheard, otherworldly sounds [. . .] not in a fantastic neverland or an unattainable, distant future, but here and now, as a harbinger of things to come’ (p. 11). As Louis Pattison recently observed in the online music publication Bandcamp Daily (in an article celebrating the continuing creativity and activity of many individuals associated with the genesis of this experimental movement some 50 years ago), ‘the pioneers of Krautrock are still chugging away’; and this excellent Companion should prove an invaluable resource for anyone wishing to explore or rediscover the previous (or the next) half-century of what Kraftwerk called ‘Music Non-Stop’. Boing Boom Tschak!