during the course of the evening last night i kept thinking about this thread.
went to an exhibition entitled "Hommage à CAN" where some old hippie Kraut-Rock band came out of the wood works, dressed as if it was 1975 with leather pants, long hair, tie-dye, beads, etc., and played a really nice set of analog electronics, guitars and effects, and syncopated grunting. proper spaced out weird "drift-rock" (term i hadn't heard until last night actually), to a gallery full of older art-world types age from 40s to 60s.
and then i met a friend of mine to check out a new venue where we might do something, and it was jam session night. 2011, Berlin, Germany: a group of students looking musicians playing that good ol' rock and roll, with stand up bass, not only the singer sounding 100% authentic with Southern accent, perfectly inflected, and guitar, bass and drums tight as hell, even the moves down to the hip twist, the clothes down to the cowboy boots and western collared shirt. sounded really good, and the audience, also mostly students looking, were loving it.
a lot to think about here with these 2 performances... German cultural identity, American cultural hegemony... Kraut-Rock, to me some of the most amazing "rock" music of the 20th Century, and something original and unmistakably GERMAN, was vastly ignored in Germany back in the 70s, where bands imitating American and British rock got all the fame... a lot of other angles and thoughts too... not ready to commit all of them to screen.