Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop

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When they were creating and releasing their most influential albums in the mid to late 1970s, Kraftwerk were far from the musical mainstream - and yet it is impossible now to imagine the history of popular music without them. Today, Kraftwerk are considered to be an essential part of pop's DNA, alongside artists like the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, and Little Richard. Kraftwerk's immediate influence might have been on a generation of synth-based bands (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the Human League, Depeche Mode, Yello, et al), but their influence on the emerging dance culture in urban America has proved longer lasting and more decisive. This collection of original essays looks at Kraftwerk - their legacy and influence - from a variety of angles, and demonstrates persuasively and coherently that however you choose to define their art, it's impossible to underestimate the ways in which it predicted and shaped the future.

Reviews

"No one but C-3PO makes love to Kraftwerk. No one liked them much to begin with - certainly not in Germany.Yet they eventually managed to attract sufficient critical mass to create a new star. And everyone else found themselves firmly in orbit.This book of original essays scrutinises their cultural influence from all angles. Here, Kraftwerk are cast as Cousins of Iggy Pop, Duchamp, Gilbert and George, Heirs to Hitler, Stockhausen, Gropius and The Beach Boys. Brothers of Beuys and Bambaataa, Kin to Kiefer, Godfathers of British Pop, Uncles of Rave, Midwives of Detroit Techno, Sperm Donors of Dance - as mysterious and potent as the monoliths in 2001, as daft as Punk, as indispensible to understanding modern culture as Musclebuilding, Warhol, or Strictly Ballroom.If this book were a film, it would move from macro to micro every scene, if it were a meal it would be prepared by Heston Blumenthal. It's a mutation waltz, a stumble rumba, a nimble mambo, a complex minuet - and proof that cultural critics can dance." - John Foxx, synthpop pioneer and multi-media artist
"Overall, one comes away from Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop with the impression of Hutter, Schneider and co creating a multifaceted oeuvre on a par with that of Andy Warhol's, a brief phase from either's artistic corpus capable of generating an entire career for lesser talents."-The Wire
It is refreshing to encounter Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop, a new collection of academic essays on the band, which spurns fashion and firmly returns the emphasis to ideas. Editors Sean Albiez and David Pattie have assembled a compendium of rigorously argued and illuminating discussions of the band, one that more than compensates for the shallower latter-day ramifications of what Alex Seago termed in 2004 the "Kraftwerk-Effekt".' -- The Oxonian Review

Author Bio

Sean Albiez is the Programme Group Leader for Popular Music at Southampton Solent University. He has been an active musician since the mid-1980s, and has published scholarly work about John Lydon, Krautrock, and Madonna.
David Pattie is Professor in Drama in the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Chester, where he also taeches on the MA in Popular Music. He is the author of Rock Music in Performance (2007) and The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett (2001).