[please note:
i didn't catch the original email; this is
a general post and not a reply to be taken
"personally" :)]
Kraftwerk: regardless of how anyone feels
personally about their music, (i find there are
two groups of people who *really* love them:
the gear people who focus on what they were
able to do with what they had, and the music
lovers/DJs who are "damn, this twenty year
old kraftwerk still sounds as good today as
it did when recorded"; played "numbers"
on show 593 and it goes head to head with
stuff from 18 years later :)) it is impossible
to deny their contribution. it's interesting to
see how just a *sample* of a certain Kraftwerk
song can shape things in the future. for example,
Afrika Bambaataa's using the strings from
Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express for Planet
Rock (and keep in mind this was done a few
years after TEE was recorded, not right away,
so it took us in north america a while to catch
on to the good thing) and what that track went on to influence;
Juan Atkins' hearing Kraftwerk (just a bit) for
the first time and suddenly rethinking even the
music he had *already recorded* prior to
Kraftwerk. And look what Juan Atkins has done.
(shit, we can even blame Atkins for Sir Mix A Lot;
SMAL's biggest hit, "Baby Got Back", rode
the rhythm from Channel One's (Doug Craig,
relative of a certain Carl, and Juan Atkins release
from 1986 on Atkins' Metroplex) "Technicolor"!)
Dan Bell's sampling of Kraftwerk's Numbers
for an early DBX track, and look at how DBX
and Dan Bell classics have shaped things. I just
woke up and that's just three quick examples
off the top of my head, there's tons more. I
agree that people tend to talk about the same
small group of names over and over, and I won't
name any names to illustrate this point! ;) (i think
it's a human mental laziness thing to do this, not at all
something that just happens when talking
about music) but
there have always been and always will be,
unfortunately, acts who constantly get props
(deserved and not totally deserved) and
those who don't (but who do deserve it).
Take Newcleus' track "Jam On It" for example.
Listen to the break in that track: just one
bar of that break went on to inspire the British
bleep sound years later (this time north america
doing something that "outside" took a while to
catch onto; sorta the reverse of the kraftwerk
to bambaataa thing of years previous). Warp built their label
on this sound, so you could break it down to
Newcleus' "Jam On It" ... Warp Records!
(how's that for some IDM-related content,
huh? ;) Anyway, you don't hear people talking
about "oh, the break in 'Jam On It' indirectly
lead to the formation of Warp Records", but
we need to think harder to come up with that
kind of way of looking at the broader spectrum.
Things tend to get broken down into A = B,
B = C, therefore A = C. this only works in math,
not in music. to use a cliche, there's all sort of
things that have gone and continue to go into
our giant jambalaya of sound, and kraftwerk was
one of the many main ingredients (sorta the musical
soup stock :)) speakin' of food,
tummy is rumbling, time for some
cereal for breakfast :) andrew duke ps THE aTKINS/sir mix
a lot tale is told by mike grant in the text interview
on cognition (
http://techno.ca/cognition) and if
you feel like subjecting yourself to more of the
mental loopiness runnin' through my brain (in text
form :)) there's plenty of commentaries in the
same place.
little miss trinitron wrote:
quoted 10 lines I would say the most over-hyped electronic artist is Kraftwerk,
> > I would say the most over-hyped electronic artist is Kraftwerk,
> > but I won't because of the backlash it would generate.
>
> i think that is a little harsh. you've got to think of what the music world
> was like in those days, how much work and inspiration it actually took for
> kraftwerk to break through and create what they did. for that alone they
> will quite literally always be remembered. and if you take their body of
> work simply on its own merit, they are still awesome 20 years later. they
> made something very, very difficult sound very easy. autechre etc. have
> taken something very easy and made it seem difficult.
--
Cognition/Andrew Duke's In The Mix
mailto:cognition@techno.ca
http://techno.ca/cognition
1096 Queen St #123 Halifax NS Canada B3H 2R9
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