Music Style : Kraut Rock

"Maybe it's not so shocking that the chilly domains of the Aryan bullmoose have kindled a burgeonning rock-roll revoultion"

In 1971, rock journalist Lester Bangs pretty much sums up the spirit as a new sound, first perceived as an awkward regurgitation of US and UK forebears makes its way into the heads of the cognoscenti. Taking up on emerging bands only one year after the release of seminal debuts by the likes of Kraftwerk or Popol Vuh -not bad by American standards eh!- Bangs asks the question that's been crawling in the mind of anyone daring enough to have taken a bit of German in high school : how come the Germans can be so cool ?

Perhaps prescient of the kind of welcome hip German music could expect in the aftermath of WWII, Faust anticipated critics by coining on their own the, hardly elogious, term of "krautrock" as early as 1973 on Faust IV -i.e. with kraut in English referring to anything that has a soft spot for wurst and blasting rockets all over London and rock...erm referring to the King moving his pelvis on a Las Vegas stage while swallowing as many quaterpounders a man can take when he is singing about trains. Literally, German rock.

So it's pretty clear from the beginning that kraut-rock is yet another export scam. Quite frankly there is nothing in common between Can and Kraftwerk's music apart from the fact that they knew each other, that Kraftwerk performed at Can concerts and that they were perceived at their debut to be a mere Can decal. What's the shared thread between obsessed instrumentalists such as Neu or Cluster, mad electronicians such as Tangerine Dream or opera rockers of the likes of Wegmuller or Faust ? Fine Prints? Featurings of musicians such as Michael Rother on other's works -e.g. Cluster- or the ubiquity of producers such as Conrad Plank? Nothing that does jsutice to the singularity of each accomplishment and nothing that exposes connections between community rebels such as Amon Duul and music conservatory escapees such as Ralf & Florian ! Geography and fascination for modern arts ? Come off it.

Again, in his 1971 piece, Bangs digs up another interesting explanation : "There are great bands and artists everywhere, but somehow the pervasive feeling is that just like the first three years of the last decade, we are in a slack period between mass cultural eruptions". So in 1971, the whole gig is already torn to pieces, Marylin Monroe and Oola Oop don't do it anymore. It's exhaustion in the US and the UK but "meanwhile however the combined accomplishments of American and Limey bands have been seeded in less-sung rock scenes around the world [...] and some of those scenes are coming to the weirdest blooms ever heard in the Western world".

Caught between the langweilig bourgeois lifestyle of their elders and an Anglo-Saxon model there was no point in mimicking, krautrockers became the first punks. They launched their own record labels, they created DIY studios -most famous being Kling Klang-, they performed live, they meddled all genres while still resorting to their own local images and repertoire. One that made sense. Luckily [northern] Europe Endless has myths aplenty from Faustus to the Man Machine. No point blasting out about cheveys and "downtown" when it's nowhere to be found. Instrumental tracks, electronic tracks a great way to experiment but also the most radical tool to level with a competition that only speaks English.
By blowing up the deck-card castle to rebuild it in different fashion and six years before it dawned on anglo-saxons, krautorckers neverminded the bollocks!