Krautrock and the West German Counterculture
If there is any musical subculture to which this modern age of online music consumption has been particularly kind, it is certainly the obscure, groundbreaking, and oft misunderstood German pop music phenomenon known as “krautrock”. That krautrock’s appeal to new generations of musicians and fans both in Germany and abroad continues to grow with each passing year is a testament to the implicitly iconoclastic nature of the style; krautrock still sounds odd, eccentric, and even confrontational approximately twenty-five years after the movement is generally considered to have ended.1 In fact, it is difficult nowadays to even page through a recent issue of major periodicals like Rolling Stone or Spin without chancing upon some kind of passing reference to the genre. The very term has become something of a fashionable accessory for new indie bands, while the heralds of the krautrock sound – Can, Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Faust, among others – are now considered by many music journalists and critics to belong to classic rock’s highly subjective and ill-defined canon. Henning Dedekind describes krautrock’s reception by the present day music press thus:
Seit den Neunzigern berufen sich in Großbritannien mehr und mehr klassisch besetzte Rockgruppen auf die Errungenschaften deutscher Soundtüftler. Auch Musikzeitschriften wie The Face, Q Magazine, oder Mojo widmen dem fast vergessenen deutschen Rockphänomen seitenweise Aufmerksamkeit.
Quelle: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91887/1/riseppi.pdf
