Krautrock and its offshoots have had a tremendous impact on musical production and reception in Great Britain and the United States since the 1970s. Krautrock was primarily a West German art form and differed significantly from East German Ostrock, with the latter’s emphasis on more traditional song structures. There are no precise dates for krautrock, and while the heyday of the movement was roughly from 1968 to 1974, one could also argue that it lasted well into the 1980s. Many krautrock bands arose out of the West German student counterculture and connected leftist political activism with experimental rock music and, later, electronic sounds. Generally, krautrock is used as a catch-all term for the music of various white West German rock groups of the 1970s that blended influences of African American and Anglo-American music with the experimental and →electronic music of European composers. Therefore, unlike other accounts of the music, this book prominently features artists like Donna Summer and David Bowie. 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. 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. I situate krautrock 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 US popular culture within this framework. 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. Instead, I investigate how national identity gets transformed when it has become impossible to defend (as in the case of post-Nazi Germany).
However, this book is not an attempt to celebrate the essential Germanness of artists like Klaus Schulze or Amon Düül II. Reissues of long out-of-print albums, eagerly anticipated live appearances by formerly obscure artists like Faust, and the ongoing references to bands like Kraftwerk, Can, and Neu! in the music of post-rock, indie, and electronica artists have prompted a renewed interest in musicians who deliberately operated outside the Anglo-American mainstream. Introduction West German popular music from the late 1960s and early 1970s, commonly referred to as “krautrock” today, has had an astonishing renaissance in the last decade.
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