Krautrock: German Music in the Seventies (Tracking Pop) Paperback – Illustrated, August 30, 2016

A good read, very interesting perspective on those great German bands, I’d find it hard to choose between this and Future Days by David Stubbs on the same subject matter. There is a great deal, for those who want to know, about Can, Kraftwerk, and Neu!, I wish there had been a little more depth on Popol Vuh, for example, than the lengthy piece on Giorgio Moroder. There’s a nice tie-in with Bowie’s Berlin trilogy masterpieces too, and the authors intense hatred of Werner Herzog is almost uncomfortable reading as he all but states that Herzog is a racist. Very bizarre.

This book is titled >> Krautrock:German Music In The Seventies....and many times I had to go look at the jacket here to remind myself that it was titled that ....as indeed it seems to be only TANGENTIALLY interested in Krautrock.The writer is a cultural sociologist and will place the phrase "in the context of krautrock's deterritorialization and reterritorialization" [or similar] as often as possible ...[from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work yawn yawn yawn ...]...you will read a Krautrock 101 potted version of the history of the main protagonists Can/Neu!/Kraftwerk/Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze/Ash Ra Tempel/Popol Vuh etc ... and will probably read almost nothing that you did not already know ... then the writer moves to a looonnng chapter on Werner Herzog with occasional reminders that Popol Vuh was scoring these films often [still overall insofar as I can think off-topic] ...... and drifts even further away with a spurious attempt at linking Donna Summer and Georgio Moroder to Krautrock !?!? [however not so ludicrous a claim on the 1975 album Einzelgänger ] .... and then moves to David Bowie [yes we all know he worked with Eno who had spent time with Harmonia but that makes it the absolute most tenuous of connections].If you are twisted and enjoy sociological works which make purple look green or any permutations of a similar nature then read it; otherwise stick to Cope's Krautrocksampler as in 2016 it is still the only opus available ... and not even in book formOne day soon someone will write a good and in-depth book on Krautrock; but as of today this book does not as yet exist ...PS: for all its sins this book IS a good read nonetheless ... if you know little about Krautrock you might enjoy it; if you are a forty + year in-the-making fan it is probably best avoided