Why do people get Rothko but not Stockhausen?

**slim jenkins** · 11-12-2009, 08:12 AM

It's easy to look at and appreciate a Rothko as an ambient visual piece for obvious reasons, although many would not rate it as 'art' in what they regard as the 'proper' sense of the word.

I'm not convinced lots of people 'get' Rothko - it's more like buying into the postcard 'cool' merchandising of him.

He uses paint, yes, people recognise that, but Stockhausen's abstraction of sound is presumably baffling? The old music vs sound conundrum.

**straight** · 11-12-2009, 09:39 AM

Because Stockhausen goes EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKHHEEEEEEKKKKEEEHEEH and is a bit more requiring of effort with duration. I personally dont think Stockhausen has a particularly small following, all the parts of his retrospective at the South bank last year were jammed

**slim jenkins** · 11-12-2009, 09:47 AM

A big following amongst a minority?

**Martin Dust** · 15-12-2009, 06:50 PM

Originally Posted by zhao

truth of the matter is: Kraftwerk would not have existed if Motown, Soul and Funk did not come before. but Hiphop would still have thrived if Kraftwerk never dropped out of Art School.

Are you sure about that? Have you heard the first 4 Kraftwerk albums? There's no doubt there is influence but the same goes for Schlager - I don't feel you can point to one thing in this case.

**zhao** · 15-12-2009, 07:19 PM

Originally Posted by Martin Dust

Are you sure about that?

quite.

Originally Posted by Martin Dust

Have you heard the first 4 Kraftwerk albums?

since age 19 (love those flutes on the first 2!) as well as all the related projects.

Originally Posted by Martin Dust

I don't feel you can point to one thing in this case.

in this case one can certainly point to one thing having a much more dominant and important influence on the other. consider the immensity of Motown, Funk and Soul as massive cultural landslide movements involving hundreds of record labels and thousands of artists and decades of history and their unstoppable momentum and tragectory, versus a few outsider kraut rockers messing with keyboards.

schlager's influence on kraftwerk is questionable at best, while they grew up on American pop and proudly admits of the massive influence.

but of course other things influenced the kraut experiments. Czukay's interested in South Asian melodies and African rhythms, Rother's interest in minimalism and repetition...

**Martin Dust** · 15-12-2009, 08:03 PM

[explodes]

**Martin Dust** · 15-12-2009, 09:48 PM

schlager's influence on kraftwerk is questionable at best, while they grew up on American pop and proudly admits of the massive influence.

OK, bit by bit

Schlager was a massive influence, they even parodied back the lyric style and sang them in German, which at the time for such bands as Kraftwerk was very unusual. Stockhausen was a bigger influence than US pop, the whole idea of concepts and being conceptual came from here and if you add Conny Plank you can hear the start of everything on the track KlingKlang and later on Autobahn. I don't feel the pop music influence really appeared until Radioactivity.

**zhao** · 16-12-2009, 04:01 AM

Originally Posted by Martin Dust

OK, bit by bit

Schlager was a massive influence, they even parodied back the lyric style and sang them in German, which at the time for such bands as Kraftwerk was very unusual. Stockhausen was a bigger influence than US pop, the whole idea of concepts and being conceptual came from here and if you add Conny Plank you can hear the start of everything on the track KlingKlang and later on Autobahn.

fair enough. this line may have been a little bit neglected in my estimation.

Originally Posted by Martin Dust

I don't feel the pop music influence really appeared until Radioactivity.

also more or less correct: but that is to say the Kraftwerk the vast majority of the world knows and loves, the electro-pop Kraftwerk, was heavily influenced by all those 4 minute love songs from across the atlantic.

and so my thesis remains: without Kraftwerk hiphop would have surely been born and thrived as a natural extension of all the Black American music which came before. albeit may be via a slightly different route -- but with funk and jazz artists of the 70s already enthusiastically experimenting with electronics, this different route in our alternate universe would have been only very slightly different.

but without the bass heavy boom bap of Funkadelic, without the achingly sweet song craft of Marvin Gaye, without this entire cultural lineage, Kraftwerk would have remained anonymous art uni pranksters in the history of music.

**Martin Dust** · 16-12-2009, 10:05 AM

also more or less correct: but that is to say the Kraftwerk the vast majority of the world knows and loves, the electro-pop Kraftwerk, was heavily influenced by all those 4 minute love songs from across the atlantic.

I'm not sure I agree here either, what people "know" and what is true are two very different things. You seem to be side stepping actual documented history to make your arguement work Zhao

They (Kraftwerk) had already started to condense their music after Autobahn and added even more lyrics to all future releases, I think I mentioned that last time

If anyone was a big influence then I'd say it was James Brown, the never ending groove was a big influence (Karl has stated this many times) but they always did things their way and had very strong ideas about how "music werkers" do and present things. The big thing for a lot of Krautrockers was that you must be doing and have something original, it must be your own.

You'll find this attitude in Cluster, Neu!, Pop and Faust etc. This is what Kraftwerk did, they made their own thing and that which influenced also became their own because they did little to copy anyone, look at The Model for example, it doesn't even have a chorus! If they'd be copying or been influenced that strongly by pop music as you suggest it would have one.

But the fact remains that what you're saying doesn't really stack up, Autobahn wasn't pop music and it was this track that broke them to the world, OK it had the humourous reference to The Beach Boys but this piece of work is anything but pop music, plus it's very much the work of the studio and Conny Plank, you have to look at the whole history and not select just the parts that work

and so my thesis remains: without Kraftwerk hiphop would have surely been born and thrived as a natural extension of all the Black American music which came before. albeit may be via a slightly different route -- but with funk and jazz artists of the 70s already enthusiastically experimenting with electronics, this different route in our alternate universe would have been only very slightly different.

The DJ, decks and drum machines played a massive part, I'd say that the fact that Kraftwerk drums where always on time was one of the reasons their tracks got picked up and used because they are easy to mix, plus lets not forget the instrumental B-Side that also appeared in the 80s. I don't remember saying that they invented Hip Hop anyway

and I don't know anything about Hip Hop to chat about it really as I lost interest in it very quickly.