|
|
Speaking
in 2005 of the Kling Klang studio in which Kraftwerk created and refined
their sound, band member Ralf Hutter also summarised the wider context in
which the experimental German music that is commonly, and unfortunately,
labelled 'Krautrock', was
developed:
We were in our studio,
with the doors closed and there
was silence. Now what is
our music, what is our language,
what is our sound? We
realised we had to start from zero.
It's an amazing
opportunity... We didn't have to reject
anything. It was an empty
space. And that same feeling
was everywhere.'
Whereas British progressive rock has received a relatively rough critical
ride, the adventurous, experimental music that came out of West Germany at
the same time has been eulogised. Bands like Can, Faust and Neu! are
frequently name-checked and some regard Kraftwerk as the most influential
band of the Seventies, possibly since the Beatles. Future Days is the most
comprehensive attempt, as yet, to consider this music and, moreover, to
relate it to the cultural, social and political context that produced it -
the miraculous, yet problematic transformation of West Germany from the
desolate Allied Sector of 1945 to a prosperous, advanced European nation in
less than a generation.
David Stubbs is a couple of years younger than me, and evidently discovered
this music at much the same time as I did. There's a generational aspect to
this, in that many of us 'late boomers' found Europe - particularly Germany -
as charismatic culturally as the 'early boomers' had found the USA (which, of
course, had lost some of its lustre by the Seventies). So I can identify with
the biographical aspects of this book - the frisson of watching 'continental'
football live on TV, the effect of Bowie's
unexpected yet shrewd sojourn in Berlin, the lure of other name-checked
European destinations and the doomed attempts to interest fellow sixth-formers
in experimental music. However we differ in that, whereas I also maintained
an interest in progressive rock his post-punk sensibility is essentially
hostile to it. This appears to colour his judgement at times, as I will
discuss later.
Future Days has both an encyclopaedic sweep and a close
attention to detail. It begins, as it must, by tackling the term 'Krautrock' itself
which is clearly derived from an offensive racial stereotype. Would anyone
have described Jimi Hendrix's music as 'Spaderock', Stubbs
asks, whilst defending the use of the term on the grounds that it is now
used, almost exclusively, in a positive sense (to the point of being
carelessly cited, by up-and-coming bands and critics alike, on the flimsiest
of pretexts). Whilst the term smacks of post-World War Two xenophobia and
arrogance, there's no accepted alternative at Stubbs' disposal
and, if he'd tried to invent one, the book might have sunk without trace. So
the word (alas) is probably here to stay.
That stumbling block having been vaulted (just about), the book gets into its
stride with a detailed, lucid and knowledgeable explanation of the context in
which this music came into being. Simply put, estrangement and empowerment were the
key factors. The generation that produced this music were the children of
those Germans who had come to maturity during the Third Reich and who had
settled down, once the horrors of 1945 had given way to the economic miracle
of the Fifties and the Sixties, into a guilty affluence in which the past was
seldom talked about and the pursuit of creature comforts was accompanied by
the reassuring banalities of Schlager music.
These children revolted against the materialism of their parents as they grew
up, perhaps more intensely than in other European countries due to these
historical factors. After an initial attraction to American culture they also
reacted, partly due to Vietnam, against both America and its musical
hegemony. Doubly-estranged, they became cultural orphans who felt compelled
to create their music (and art, film and literature) for themselves.
At the same time, this generation was empowered - as West German society was
affluent, there was casual work and (presumably, as in the UK at that time),
a relatively relaxed approach to benefits. The parents whose values they
rejected were often able to support them in times of need, and record
companies were throwing advances around wildly in order to discover the next 'supergroup' - for
example the story of Faust, who were bizarrely and hilariously identified as
the 'German Beatles' despite their counter-cultural lifestyle and
uncompromising music, is told in this book. So, both estranged and empowered
as they were, this generation followed through their inclinations - with the
active or tacit support of the very society whose values they rejected - to
create a music that would, of course, draw upon what had gone before but in
an untrammelled and eclectic way.
Stubbs also covers the geographical factors. Unlike the UK then and now, West
Germany was not dominated by a single urban centre - West Berlin was, of
course, an isolated enclave at that time. Thus, he describes how specific
cities gave rise to particular scenes and bands. That isn't the same as
explaining things away, as if it were inevitable that Hamburg would produce
Faust, Cologne Can, Berlin Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, Munich Amon
Duul and Dusseldorf Neu! and Kraftwerk (and so on - although other major
cities such as Frankfurt and Stuttgart made little contribution, it seems).
However, Stubbs' account of these factors is a convincing one.
Another strength is the way in which, at best, he can describe a piece of
music in words - a 'dance about architecture' he has been performing, of
course, for a very long time as an experienced music journalist. I was
generally impressed by his descriptions of tracks I've known
for many years, and confident that they would introduce the music to readers
who had never heard it. This, for example, is how he describes Kraftwerk's
'Kristallo' (from the early, relatively experimental album Rolf and
Florian):
'Kristallo', named after
a local hotel, is spindly and
metallic, a further hint
of shapes to come, a hissing
and spitting rhythm box
at odds with the simulated
harpsichord strains that
hang over the mix like a
chandelier.
|
|
|
And
here is his description of the third and fourth movements of Tangerine
Dream's masterpiece Zeit (which, in its evocation of a universe that
is, in his words 'vast and indifferent to human concerns, cold
and neutral', might be ranked alongside similar works by
Ligeti and Stockhausen if classical music wasn't such a
closed shop):
'Origin of Supernatural
Probabilities' and the title
track are similarly
disquieting, hanging there like
some vast, unstirred
cosmological fact, their slow,
worming drones and
wheeling arcs going beautifully
and obliviously about
their business.
This book describes literally hundreds of tracks in this way, expertly
conveying a sense of the music and its concerns. Overall, the range of the
book is encyclopaedic and every band and solo artist that one would expect to
be covered is present. However, there is a caveat and it is one that prevents
the book from being 'the definitive book on the ultimate music' as Stubbs' associate
Simon Reynolds rhapsodises on the (simply designed and beautiful) cover.
Although we may differ as to the exact dates, Stubbs and I seem to agree that
there were essentially two phases to so-called 'Krautrock'. In the
first, which started in around 1968 and ran until the mid-Seventies (I would
personally argue for 1974, when both Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk broke
through commercially in the UK and USA), the emphasis was on experiment and
creativity rather than mass appeal. However, in the second phase - which
lasted throughout the late Seventies and into the early Eighties - much of
the music became melodic and upbeat and consequently less avant-garde.
The band I followed most closely during that second phase (or 'silver age'?) was Tangerine
Dream, having been captivated with their earlier releases on hearing them in
1976 and 1977. However, it became a slightly dispiriting exercise when, with Cyclone in 1978,
they introduced vocals for the first time. As each subsequent release came
out, I hoped that somehow the 'old' Tangerine Dream of my five favourite
albums - Alpha Centauri, Zeit, Atem, Phaedra and Rubycon
- would
re-appear, and as there were still hints that it might do so I kept on buying
them - and even liking them up to a point - until I completely lost hope in
the mid-Eighties (since then, taking no interest in their output).
Stubbs and I agree that Tangerine Dream's best
releases were the earlier ones - although for him the rot begins to set in
considerably earlier, with Phaedra and its 'scampering
sequencers' (he appears to have something of an aversion
to sequencers). He is entirely dismissive of Tangerine Dream's second
phase but he is also dismissive, more surprisingly, of La DŸsseldorf (formed
by Klaus Dinger of Neu!, spoken of in the same breath as their
fellow-DŸsseldorfers Kraftwerk in the late Seventies and even eulogised as a
possible 'soundtrack of the Eighties' by David
Bowie). La DŸsseldorf were clearly a more 'commercial'
proposition than Neu!, but their music was accessible without insulting the
intelligence and is harshly served by this book.
|
|
|
I baulk all the more
at his dismissal of the work that Klaus Schulze released during that period.
In highly-evocative and culturally-literate releases such as Mirage (1977), X (1978), Dune (1979), Live (1980) and
Audentity (1983), Schulze mainly expresses the themes and concerns
of an earlier tradition, that of German Romanticism, in electronic music that
is often multi-hued, other-worldly and unsettling in the manner of a Trakl
poem or a Friedrich painting. Indeed, Stubbs invokes the 'ethereal
reaches of the New Age bracket' in the
context of Schulze's later music which, in my view, amounts to a
crude insult - especially as readers might not be acquainted with these
albums.
But the accessible, commercially-successful music that Kraftwerk produced in
1977 and 1978 with Trans-Europe Express and The Man-Machine? Well,
that's different. And yes, on one level it is different,
given the influence that Kraftwerk have had on the development of modern
music, particularly dance music, since. However, as the development of
Kraftwerk's music during the Seventies followed a
similar trajectory to that of all the other key bands and solo artists
covered, then why not recognise the overall trajectory consistently and
fairly? It is as if the apotheosis of Kraftwerk, from the wonderfully
innovative band they were at that time to a Band Who Can Do No Wrong, has led
to a fundamental distortion.
This may be due to another factor at work, with regard to the later work of
Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream in particular, which is Stubbs'
fundamental hostility to progressive rock. In stereotypical post-punk
fashion, he caricatures this as 'topographical excursions and faux-mediaeval
fantasias' and reacts against anything that reminds him of it. Reading this
kind of criticism is like being time-warped back into the early Eighties -
not only are these blanket generalisations inadequate to the richness of prog
(King Crimson, Van Der Graaf Generator/Peter Hammill, Soft Machine and Henry
Cow, to quote just four examples, can hardly be shoe-horned into this
paradigm), but they are not even adequate to the total output of the bands
that tend to receive maximum opprobrium (inevitably, and predictably, Yes, ELP
and Genesis as if their periodic over-reaching somehow tainted the whole of
prog). I respect his point-blank refusal to recognise anything positive in
progressive rock, but I also believe that it hobbles him critically at times.
However, and despite these caveats, this is a readable and comprehensive
guide to this vitally-influential (if scandalously misnamed) musical
phenomenon. The only mistake would be to read it as definitive - it's too
rooted in a particular critical ethos for this to be the case. Rather, this
is a book that covers much ground whilst leaving plenty of room for others.
One of these, for example, might be an appraisal of the so-called 'Berlin
School' of instrumental electronic music - of which
Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze are of course the best-known exemplars - by
someone who does not regard any trace of prog as suspect, and recognises the
difference between this music and the soothing banalities of New Age music
proper.
I also hope that Stubbs is at least a little bit wrong when he writes 'I don't believe
there is any lost Atlantis on the Krautrock map... we basically know who was
who and what was what'. In 1995, a series of three CDs collectively
entitled Unknown Deutschland was released, featuring obscure
recordings made between 1972 and 1974 in and around Cologne. I certainly
wouldn't claim that any of the featured bands can be
ranked for originality with the likes of Can and Faust. However, there's some
decent material scattered across these CDs, some of which is highly experimental,
and this suggests an even larger scene than this book describes. Maybe there
are no more Atlantises (!), but further islets and skerries of this
fascinating music will hopefully still be discovered.
© Norman
Jope, 2014
|