Saturday, September 3, 2016

Postscript: Krautrock book now available, here is a passage that didn't make it into the book


NOTE: My krautrock book is now available from the University of Michigan Press. 

Here is a personal narrative that didn't make it into the book:
I was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1972, in the midst of the krautrock boom. Can had just released Tago Mago and were recording Ege Bamyasi at the time. Faust were turning heads in Great Britain. Tangerine Dream were experimenting with the glacial sounds of Zeit. Werner Herzog was shooting Aguirre, supported by Popol Vuh’s harrowing soundtrack. Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser was encouraging his musicians to take LSD. Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother had left Kraftwerk and were now performing as Neu!. However, I would be oblivious to these major events in the history of popular music for another three decades. What kindled my interest in krautrock was intimately connected with my move to the United States just before September 11th, 2001.
Growing up in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, I developed an early interest in pop music, partly in opposition to my mother, who only cared for European classical composers, and my father, who collected records of music from India, China, and Iran. With my sister, I listened to bands of the short-lived Neue Deutsche Welle, German-language new wave, on our transistor radio instead. Gradually, music from Germany completely disappeared from my interests. My sister bought the Beatles’ Blue Album on cassette and we watched Woodstock in a movie theater. For my 13th birthday, I got a stereo system with a Sony record player. My first album was Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. During recess, my best friend and I argued about who was the greatest pop star of all time, Elton John or John Lennon. By the time I was 16, I had seen Santana, B.B. King, and Neil Young live in concert.
As my interest shifted more toward African American music in college, I became enamored with blues, tracing its sites on a U.S. trip in 1992 and writing my M.A. thesis on Robert Johnson. After studying abroad in Austin, Texas for a year, I now also listened to indie rock, soul, and old country. My wife, who had spent the first three years of her life in Argentina and was eager to leave Germany, convinced me that I should put my fascination with America to the test and go to grad school in the U.S. With two small children, we moved to Iowa City in 2001. Over the next decade, while I was finishing my Ph.D. in American studies and got a job at the University of Wyoming and eventually even a Green Card, we had two more children. Their first language was German, but their passports were American.
It is this liminal space, located somewhere between a hypernationalist U.S. and a self-deprecating post-war Germany, that I share with my wife and my children, and it is this liminal space that made me seek out semi-obscure krautrock bands from the 1970s. Learning that British and American artists I admired, artists like David Bowie and Afrika Bambaataa, drew inspiration from West German groups somehow made me feel less like a stranger in a strange land. Recognizing my Germanness through a U.S. perspective on krautrock, I understood that I did not have to become fully Americanized, even if I was losing my accent. I had grown up in a place where displays of nationalism were only permissible during the soccer world cup, a place where nobody celebrated German Unity Day on October 3rd although it was a national holiday. Now I lived in a place where, in particular after the World Trade Center had collapsed, American flags were everywhere, international news were reduced to a “global minute” on TV, and the 4th of July was celebrated with fireworks, while bombs exploded on foreign soil. In this climate, it was reassuring to listen to Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, an album that defiantly rejected American sentiments, but still cracked the U.S. Top Ten in 1974.
I should note, though, that never since moving to the United States back in 2001 have I regretted that decision. This book, then, is not an attempt to celebrate the essential Germanness of artists like Klaus Schulze or Amon Düül II. Instead, I investigate how national identity gets transformed when it has become impossible to defend (as in the case of post-Nazi Germany). As I argue throughout the book, krautrock represents a process in which the nation-state becomes deterritorialized, hybridized, and ironically inverted, as well as increasingly cosmopolitan, communal, and imbued with alternative spiritualities. I situate the music within its particular context of national identity and globalization and address krautrock’s intersections of transnational musical production and the reshaping of the globalization of U.S. popular culture within this framework. Although it emerged with an emphasis on a specific white West German counterculture, krautrock’s expressions of sonic identity proved to be varied and conflicted. The transnational focus of my analysis within the context of globalization demands a broader definition of the term krautrock that is inclusive of developments on the periphery of any German “mainstream,” in particular in terms of gender, “race,” and nationality. Therefore, unlike other accounts of the genre, this book prominently features artists like Donna Summer and David Bowie.