In the early morning hours of January 27, 2019 a series of three emails were sent from East Portland Blog headquarters to Rock’s Premier Autodidact, Tom Kipp. In recent years, increasing numbers of bands from all over the globe have cited Krautrock as an influence, or have described their music as “Krautpop.” EPB needed guidance from Mr. Kipp as to the relative importance of this recent and moderately surprising resurgence. After receiving a catalyzing question in one of those emails from EPB Headquarters, Mr. Kipp spent the next three hours composing the blue encyclical you see further down on this page. We hope you enjoy this gift of Mr. Kipp’s wisdom as much as we do.
Here is the compound question posed to Mr. Kipp on January 27:
EPB: Dozens of bands have claimed Krautrock influences in the past year… Why? Does this interest you?
Tom Kipp: Hot in the 80s
Dave, I must admit that it really doesn’t, at least not in the absence of (at least) a few Exceedingly Compelling and Original Recordings! If those exist, I’d LOVE to know about them. But at present I’m unwilling to troll the internet in search of that which (in my view) likely doesn’t exist.
I mean, it was one thing for me to ferret out Can‘s and Faust‘s obscure, then-10-to-20-year-old, import-only LPs from Montana back in the 1980s, at a time when neither was more than a passing name in a Rock reference book here or there, a mere “bread crumb” in the trail toward (what one imagined to be) a Mythic (West) German Music Scene not widely known even in its NATIVE country, ca. 1985. And to put into practice with Ein Heit the odd element of what I could gloss from the few recordings I DID manage to acquire and assimilate.
And when—a decade or so later—there were suddenly a handful of widely-dispersed Indie Rock artistes (Jessamine, most prominently/satisfyingly for me, and perhaps Stereolab, but also Roy Montgomery, Dadamah, Dissolve, La Bradford, Cul de Sac, Flying Saucer Attack, and several more affiliated with Chicago’s marvelous Kranky Records boutique label, and a few others here and there, with my local pals in Kinski marking a sort of logical end point for said era, ca. 1998) evincing clear familiarity with the works of Neu!, Amon Duul II, Ash Ra Tempel, Guru Guru, and early Kluster, Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream, in addition to the two Pantheon Krautrock acts mentioned above, I took that as a positive sign of long-delayed Aesthetic Assimilation and eagerly awaited the potentially-wonderful, syncretic, album-length results.
Which never particularly arrived, aside from Jessamine’s two excellent albums and an odds & sods summation of their intriguing highways & by-ways, and Stereolab’s 1996 EMPEROR TOMATO KETCHUP, though the three (New Zealand-based) Roy Montgomery-led acts that head the second portion of my list had much to recommend them as well.
In a way this faint Krautrock “Echo”—apparently noticed by virtually no one in all of Rockcrit, save for me and the folks marketing esoteric Indie releases via FORCED EXPOSURE (both the infamous fanzine and its subsequent record label/Indie distribution platform)—now seems almost as charmingly quaint as the ca. 1980 Rockabilly Revival of The Stray Cats, et al., mostly in fashion/fad-oriented, gleefully-anachronistic Great Britain, but obviously here too, once MTV got a look at Brian Setzer’s quiff, cheekbones, and tattoos!
Tom Kipp: Cool in the 20-teens
Of course one could readily argue that the IMPULSE behind said Krautrock Revival was more artful and thus more formally justifiable, that because NO artiste(s) in the annals of said genre had ever made much of a commercial or cultural impact (whether in America or overseas), the FORMAL ELEMENTS of said music were not yet in any way “played out” or “exhausted”, since there’d been no Jerry Lee Lewis or Gene Vincent or Roy Orbison or Eddie Cochran to galvanize attention during its original era, much less an ELVIS!
But of course NONE of the aforementioned Krautrock Revivalists made anything approaching even the long-delayed impact Can or Faust eventually had on the British Postpunk of, say, Public Image Ltd. or This Heat, to choose two distinct veins within said genre. Or achieved the semi-popular breakthrough by extension that, for instance, Neu! and Cluster (the post-Kluster iteration of Moebius and Roedelius, as they—like Kraftwerk—evolved right along with the synthesizer and sequencer technology that made possible their later innovations) achieved via the “magpie” borrowings of David Bowie and Brian Eno, particularly during said duo’s famed “Berlin Period”!
When during the early-2000s there was a much-ballyhooed “Postpunk Revival”, populated by bands who seemed like mediocre-to-bad “Tribute Acts” for various ca. 1980 Brit Postpunk innovators—Interpol (as Joy Division, allegedly), British Sea Power (as Echo & the Bunnymen, semi-competently), The Rapture (as The Cure, ludicrously)—I felt much as I do today in responding to your “Krautrock-influenced” query.
And when Lester Bangs wrote (in early-1982, as part of his 1981 VILLAGE VOICE “Pazz & Jop Critics Poll” ballot, mere months prior to his accidental death) that “almost all current music is worthless. Very simply, it has no soul. It is fraudulent….New Wave has terminated in thudding hollow Xeroxes of poses that aren’t even annoying anymore”, I suspect he was feeling something akin to what I feel about these latter day “revivals”, whether of Krautrock or Postpunk, which I’d sooner label festering compost heaps of Wikipedia/Spotify-generated NOTHING!
I remain WIDE OPEN to being swept away by new bands/albums/individual songs. But I can’t engage in the sort of rampant “grade inflation” that would permit me to herald the latest instances of Millenial Musical Cosplay as anything notable, much less music for the ages! Thus, a second “Krautrock Revival” arrives all-but-stillborn for me, assuming it arrives at all, until or unless someone/something breaks the skin, as it were.
P.S. Here’s the VOICE link to Lester’s remarks, which’re located just over halfway down the page, below Christgau’s essay and the sample ballots of many other rockcrits. This was the first VOICE P & J Poll I ever saw, purchased at a convenience store called “Store 24″ on Thayer Street, the main drag through the Brown campus, in late-January 1982:
Early in November, as disconsolate as most of my colleagues about the run of rock and roll in 1981, I disclosed the results of the eighth or ninth Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll to anybody who …
