Why do people get Rothko but not Stockhausen?

slim jenkins

El Hombre Invisible
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

wings cru
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
 

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
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

there are no accidents
Are you sure about that?

quite.

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.

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

Techno Zen Master
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.
 
Last edited:

zhao

there are no accidents
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.

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

Techno Zen Master
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.
 
Last edited:

mvuent

Void Dweller
did anyone read rouge’s foam’s book, infinite music? i read the first few pages on amazon and really liked the angle he was taking. i think he was almost exactly my age when he wrote it as well as the brutal dismemberment of stubbs’ book linked to in the OP. which quite frankly is intimidating given how unwaveringly authoritative and reference-packed his writing is. a true goldsmiths golden boy.

however, i can’t help but notice that over a decade later it’s still the only book he’s written, and his blog basically stops around 2015. you’d expect more work reaching the public sphere after such an impressive start. was the youthful, hubristic energy of rouge’s foam sapped as he was shallowed into the arcane, labyrinthine bureaucracies of academia??? has he elected to take a “silent decade” like kant???? i need to know!!
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
only one review on amazon…

INFINITE MUSIC: IMAGINING THE NEXT MILLENNIUM OF HUMAN MUSIC MAKING
1.0 out of 5 stars 1 rating

Top international reviews
David X
1.0 out of 5 stars great idea, disappointing execution
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 15, 2013
Verified Purchase
Read this after directly after reading David Byrne's excellent How Music Works and was extremely let down. Infinite Music has a fantastic premise but is somewhat lacking in ideas, momentum, and energy.
2 people found this helpful

seems to have been better received among his own tribe however. there was even a book discussion hosted by the wire in cafe oto.
 
Top