Was the musical future specifically predicted by Kraftwerk and James Brown?

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the phrasing of the question. If the "musical future" (as predicted in 1970) = 2004, then Kraftwerk + JB = future is a reasonable choice. If this question had been asked in, say, 1985, I'd have a hard time believing that the Beatles wouldn't have been cited. Bands with four nice-looking guys writing and performing their own songs seemed like more of an endgame for music then, compared to now.

What about 2025? Will we still consider Kraftwerk and JB to be as important as they are now, or will that model be overhauled? Right this instant, that might seem like a crazy idea, but probably no more crazy than making the same suggestion about the Beatles in 1985.

Hopefully that didn't sound too garbled.

In 1985? I dunno...thinking of some of the major acts then, Tears for Fears would fall into that model, Motley Crue too if you squinted. ;-)

Can you tell me where, say, My Bloody Valentine fits into this theory?

It doesn't, not offhand at least. The absolutely overarching spot MBV has in my head and my personal taste is separate from what I've vaguely thought about in wider terms this way. But in terms of where the influence could be seen on them as a specific band, their experimentation with funk/hip-hop loops -- James Brown-via-Public Enemy -- perhaps is telling. Keep in mind I'm not drawing on trying to tie every band or musician ever into this theory, though -- I'm looking at the broad strokes.

I didn't think too hard about the exact year, but I did want to choose a year that preceeded the breakout years of hip-hop, house and techno. My general point about temporal perspective is unchanged, though.

(though not country!)

Yes, this was the interesting fly in the ointment -- maybe. If we wanted to step outside America, does that as 'big time pop music' because merely a smaller regional variant of interest to part of the market? And does a band like Big'n'Rich act as the first signal that it's about to start changing more? (I have no idea, I'm not a hyperbooster like Chuck or Frank, but that seems to be part of the invested promise in the band.)

What I mean by "dance music" here is not something extemely general like any form of rock n' roll music (like the way I'm guessing Chuck Eddy would define it), but at the same time, nothing specific like hard 2-step, or even just 'electronic dance music', but certainly the general (and stressing "general" here) foundation of "club" music from the late 70s and thereafter, if you will...

(I'm wondering though if it's unfair that we're leaving out rock bands like T. Rex or Sweet or Slade, though)

First off, we have to have a minimum earliest year here. Kraftwerk didn't really start making such waves until 1977, so your basis has to start there pretty much. (James Brown and Lee Perry and others, earlier, of course).

That said, I'm still not comfortable with the pop angle being included here.. or even much of the club angle, to be honest. I can't ignore Giorgio Moroder, for example, although.. if we're talking generalizations,.. sure, Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder fall under the same general cluster there.

It's really based on how one connects the dots under a purposely blurred glass screen, isn't it?

wasn't "Autobahn" a big single?

also: Eno

I connect mine via a Fibonacci sequence.

But look, food for thought as the JB's once said: I think the *real* source for a lot of it is actually Latin music, because James Brown took that, didn't he? Broke up bass patterns, used space, stop/start, as did Latin music? I can't imagine "Cold Sweat" or something like that without thinking about Latin music, actually. To me, the diff between the Beatles and that ilk is the tighetning-up of music, which is the essence of funk, you can hear it in many things in the '60s and I guess in hard bop of the '50s. Whereas the Beatles tried to do it, but they were just too fucking floppy in the rhythm section, I think they heard it maybe but they could not do it. And so I don't know if it really comes from James B. or if he simply codified it.

Miles Davis's stuff in the '70s seems another harbinger of the "future," I've always been big on records like "On the Corner" and "Calypso Frelimo" as indicators of a future music. And I think he's a real good example, as he was pretty self-consciously abandoning the baggage of "jazz" and "changes" in order to get at something which he said came out of his listening to Stockhausen and James Brown, Sly, Hendrix.

And yeah, Kraftwerk was important, and I think Minimalism was also important to think about. Eno: the more I think about it (and I like Eno a lot), the more I kinda think Eno was actually more of a throwback than a herald of the future; those classic rock albums are certainly great but the best stuff there, apart from "Green World" on which I think he really achieved something new, are just basic post-Beatles songs with some electric catsup on top of them, I really and truly don't hear anything all that radical in "Tiger Mountain" or "Warm Jets" beyond the aforementioned catsup. It's good catsup but you know, you could've done "Tiger Mountain" with the fucking Hi Rhythm Section and Eno singing, bring in a typewriter or two and get Manzanera to solo, and you'd have basically the same record, I think. I'm not a huge fan of his later ambient music except for that one Jon Hassell collab from '80, that's a great record; I think it's basically minimalism, you know, nothing all that new. And anyway, you're kind of talking about two different things that have now merged more or less, James Brown on the one hand playing live in the studio in a style stripped down to essentials, and studio music like Kraftwerk and Eno. Two different things, in my opinion. And that's why I like Davis's stuff from the '70s so much, flawed and frequently boring as it could be, because he kind of fused those two approaches.

I'm conservative enough to regard any "music of the future" assertions with skepticism, I guess. I'd say that Public Enemy was doing something "futuristic" in 1990 or so, rap/hip-hop in general, but I'd say that somebody like DJ Shadow, lauded at the time, was really not doing anything all that futuristic, in fact he was a throwback to prog-rock except he was a somewhat doleful American who wanted to put those sad voices of American dislocation in our faces and used some cool drum tracks to do so. "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain" from that "Endtroducing..." album is so much like Miles Davis from 1974, to me.

So I dunno...I like Tortoise's "TNT" a lot, but it's Muzak, really, smart Muzak with a larger frame of reference than most Muzak, and My Bloody Valentine, for example, were good, but again, what's really all that new about that other than the guitar sound/overload? Seems like the same thing Jim Dickinson and Chilton were doing in 1974 on "Third" to me, except maybe no one was (as) drunk?

Anyway...like I say, I don't disagree, I just think it maybe goes a bit deeper than just James Brown, who I think is the greatest popular musician of my lifetime, and Kraftwerk...

Rather than thinking of some of these artists as a starting point for what came after it might make sense to think of them as a culmination of a certain period -- James Brown as the pinnacle in the development of R&B, Soul & Funk -- Beefheart as the farthest point out for electrified blues -- Miles' '70s funk as the logical development of jazz.

If you look at it from that angle you could replace James Brown with Funkadelic and Parliament as the instigators and predictors of current musical trends: their fusion of styles, playing with image and persona, and self-concsious humor and irony being the important factors. While JB & Miles took things as far as they could go musically, Funkadelic were able to take things further through these extramusical aspects.

This fits better alongside Kraftwerk as well since their impact also has a lot to do with these extramusical issues (i.e. why Kraftwerk rather than T-Dream?). For a third reference point I would add Roxy Music who's playing with style and nostalgia and mixture of pop and the avant garde is relevant here.

one thing from ned's original post...

you can read as much symbolic hash as you want into the idea that it takes an African-American on one hand and a European band on the other to create a synthesis

...that doesn't seem to me a strange or weird idea, but rather a given in modern pop music. hasn't that been a cliche for the past century or so of american pop, that it's the result of cultural miscegenation between african-americans and european-americans?