TS: prog vs. krautrock

At last! A chance to vote for an arbitrary dichotomy!

You have to choose one genre to listen to and ignore the other
for the rest of your life

Just wondering what definition of krautrock is being made to isolate one from the other. One might be tempted to see krautrock as part of the acceptable face of prog alongside several other bands.
Is it the idea that krautrock draws more from a minimalist than maximalist influence and is based more in then contemporary classical/experimental musics tahn the 19th century classical that symphonic prog was taking from in its attempt to heighten rock in a pretentious way?

The good bits of krautrock seem to have a similar sense of experimentation as the best parts of the San Francisco scene from a couple of years earlier. Mixing in a melange of influences instead of trying to 'heighten' rock by hitching it to something as specific as classical music. But I don't think they were alone in that melange there are other musics from the same period taht had the same open embrace of other influences. It has been said that bits of kraut have a similar sloppiness in playing to that SF scene stuff too. I know taht the Grateful Dead played a number of dates in Germany on the Europe 72 tour, I wonder how many musicians linked to the krautrock scene, if there was such a thing, were in the audience.
BUt I think I need to gather my thoughts better about this and several other things.

Also how are you defining prog? There are quite a few records that fit that rubrick or that of its predecessor progressive underground taht don't fit the general stereotype of anal retentive attempts to 'heighten' rock to a level most closely linked with the bourgeois university student trenchcoat brigade.

Lets stay in the classical , shallow meaning of the genres:
Krout-experimental rock bands from 70's germany:can, faust, amon duul etc..
Prog:the successful bands from the 70's:crimson, genesis, yes etc..

gotta say prog because if nothing else there are still some amazing prog groups like Cardiacs, Echolyn, and Porcupine Tree out there - where are the great modern Kraut bands?

prog, because kraut is prog

Ingenious

Just trying to solve the contradiction within myself:
Why do I hate classic prog and love krautrock?

Kraut, because fuck prog

tago mago and close to the edge go the same places. for some the ends justify the means

perhaps better go with the generally accepted definitions here even if you don't accept them yourself

TS: rap vs. hip hop

Kraut, because fuck prog

So fucking fed up hearing about prog on ILM, so KRAUT ALL THE WAY!!!!!

In the spirit of casting an informed vote, I just tried to listen to a Yes album and well nosir.

try playing VdGG next to Can and you'll know which way to vote

country vs. honky-tonk
folk vs. bluegrass
jazz vs. bebop
blues vs. delta blues

So fucking fed up hearing about prog on ILM, so KRAUT ALL THE WAY!!!!!

To be fair, most people still seem to have the idea that prog = the worst excesses of ELP and Rick Wakeman, that's if they have an opinion at all. The Wire magazine, I'm looking at you. At least on ILM you can talk about Gryphon or PFM or whoever without necessarily being mocked on principle.

Are there any really bad krautrock bands? Not counting German bands of the 1970s who get called kraut but aren't really.

honky-tonk
folk
jazz
delta blues
prog

Once upon a time there were two brothers.
The older one was called prog. The younger was kraut.
Kraut took the disadvantages of prog and made them advanteges.
The older one was boring and repetetive. The young one was habdsome enthusiastic and unexpected.
The older one made lots of money. The younger was a starving artist.
Both of them will die but the younger one will die later happier and charmingly creative still.
The older one will die frustrated, never acceptibg his limitations, somewhat pathetic and a annoying.

I hate prog. And I heard some obscure prog too.

1977 was 36 years ago. prog is old-fashioned. punk rules

Lol

i am damo suzuki. say a prayer for the hip priest

Key artists associated with the tag include Can, Amon Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel, Faust, Popol Vuh, Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Neu!, and Kraftwerk

a pretty unfuckwithable bunch except for I've never got Can

can is one of my favorite prog bands

At least on ILM you can talk about Gryphon or PFM or whoever without necessarily being mocked on principle.

more likely you'd get completely ignored :(

country vs. honky-tonk
folk vs. bluegrass
jazz vs. bebop
blues vs. delta blues― marcos, Friday, September 2

Country
Folk
jazz
blues

after bowie, eno is my favorite british solo prog artist. there's an icy minimalism to his pre-ambient headfucks that's better for stoned night listening than lots of sunnier prog bands, especially the american ones, like kansas. i've never fallen out of love with his kraut "rock" with cluster, either

yeah I get that you don't like taxonomy. but there are some bands which are generally accepted as prog and some other bands which are generally accepted as kraut. the question is which set of bands do you prefer. it's a good question. i'm going prog.

try playing VdGG next to Can and you'll know which way to vote

that's exactly how you'd make this a difficult decision!

If itt "krautrock" includes kosmische, then I prob vote kraut. BUT fripp-wetton-bruford KC is some of my favorite music ever and i love Art Bears more than only 3 or 4 German albums. But yeah as a collective endeavor....

Harmonia Deluxe vs Winter Songs

TS: rap vs. hip hop

― reggie (qualmsley), Friday, 20 September 2013 14:43 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

voted 'flag post'

that's weird

perhaps better go with the generally accepted definitions here even if you don't accept them yourself

What are the generally accepted definitions? Fwiw, AMG and Wikipedia both describe krautrock as a subgenre of progressive rock. (Grove seems to make a distinction.) I'll check some pop history textbooks when I pick them up this weekend but I'm not convinced that there are cut-and-dry generally accepted definitions that distinguish these things.

Anyway, if you're comparing British symphonic prog to krautrock, the latter is clearly more repetitive.

... which is obv. a good thing.

Are there any really bad krautrock bands?

The bands I like I call kraturock, the ones i dont' I call prog or jazz rock.... actually I don't call anything krautrock, I prefer the term 'rock music'

i love Art Bears more than only 3 or 4 German albums.

I'm getting around this by pretending that if Kraut is separate to prog, so is RIO.

Wasn't necessarily saying it's bad but it seemed weird for nostormo to say that 'prog' was the repetitive one.

Doesn't "kraut" mean "cabbage" in German? Are German people really OK with this term?

xpost And yeah, that was going to be my next issue: if we're distinguishing between 'prog' and 'krautrock', do we also have to distinguish RIO, Canterbury, Zeuhl, ...?

laaaaaaaaa la la la laaaaaaaaaaaa

it seemed weird for nostormo to say that 'prog' was the repetitive one

Right, yeah, plenty of Krautrock artists made money too while we're at it, not as much as ELP but more than Henry Cow

were the monks brit beat or kraut rock?

Well they weren't Brits or Krauts

minnesotans, most of them, right?

Brat rock

the wurst that is

but wait, x-post to self, eddie shaw was from nevada

Eddie Shaw went on to play in a progressive rock band called Copperhead in the 1970s and later become a fiction writer; he also wrote their autobiography Black Monk Time. Shaw's fictional work is based on his experiences growing up in Nevada and is published under his full name, Thomas Edward Shaw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_monks

never heard copperhead. i'm curious!

yes or can, rush or faust, i never get sick of listening to any of them. prognosticatory rock

smart rock, dork rock, cool junk, p-funk, despite all the computations, you could dance to the rock & roll music. and it was alright

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a269/specialcamper/gif/headshakeconan.gif

77 votes for prog, 60 for kraut

the mightiest deltron zero, and automator, hit the walls with a carbonator

Yes! Fuck you, prog

http://i435.photobucket.com/albums/qq77/McNa5ty_photos/fp-logo.png

77 tools

^^^posts that sum up &c

i like prog, but not the stuff they play on classic rock radio. the german stuff, like harmonia and ash ra tempel. but it's not because i'm an elitist or anything. keith emerson's the elitist, not me

Does Manuel Gottsching count as krautrock?

no he's Balearic

Ah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWejItJsyhQ

I would not count solo Gottsching as krautrock, no, any more than I would Klaus Schulze. Just because those dudes were in Ash Ra Tempel doesn't mean their solo stuff counts...

And I can't believe people are suggesting that Crimson isn't prog!!! I mean, they're probably the best prog band of all time. That's like saying Can doesn't qualify as krautrock. And I do love Can and have for many years, but my God are they cheesy sometimes. People tend to treat these canonical krautrock bands with the same over-reverence as they treat the UK stuff with under-appreciation and too-acute disdain.

I get the overzealousness there. Can really did make three of the best albums ever, back to back to back. And the surrounding releases aren't so bad either. KC on the other hand always seemed kind of inconsistent to me. Outside of the Wetton lineup that did Larks and Red I don't think any of their lineups did more than one great album (of course, most of the lineups weren't even together for more than one album, but still, quality seems to vary wildly from album to album with them). I also feel the Can stuff seems to hold up better over time - Future Days still sounds like it could've been recorded yesterday.

"but my God are they cheesy sometimes"

for example?

maybe from Flow Motion on? though you hardly see people stanning for those albums (outside of "I Want More" which totally rules)

"Saw Delight" has many a stan

yeah, i never listened to anything from after Future Days (most fans didn't i think)
xpost

I assume that's a joke

KC on the other hand always seemed kind of inconsistent to me.

The 70s albums tend to be about two-thirds good and the rest filler. I think that they didn't work too well under the release schedule constraints of the time, when bands had to release an album and tour every year. If they'd been able to do an album every two years or so it'd probably have been all good (apart from that Ladies Of The Road song of course).

we can fly from here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g068OXdPV4I

i'd rather be dead or out of my head than training a gun on men in the sand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQWyMYXn4yc

yeah, i never listened to anything from after Future Days (most fans didn't i think)

stealth trolling at its finest

where are the great modern Kraut bands?
Oneida to thread

not, obv, "strictly" a Kraut band, but to me they take the best elements of 70s Kraut and extend, develop & deepen them.

Not enough critical chops to take on all comers, but I'll stan for them til my dying breath, at least.

Can cheese:

Both Malcolm and Damo have somewhat cheesy voices
"Smoked a haiku cigarette"
"I'm So Green"--cheesy song! Great song, but cheesy
Vast swaths of "Augmn"
Lots of the later stuff (as folks have mentioned)

delicious cheese

oneida's proggier than they are "kraut" or whatever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xsW-pp9Ls

As far as new krautrock bands, I like Camera (from Berlin) a lot but their music is basically a Neu! pastiche.

There is nothing cheesy about 'Cool in the Pool'. NOTHING.

I thought everyone was going to throw shit at me for saying I thought Tago Mago was far too long, but no thoughts? Anybody enjoy every single minute of it?

I wish "Augmn" was only 10 minutes instead of 20 but otherwise I wouldn't cut anything

There was a compilation called Cannibalism 1 that had several tracks in much shorter edits including Mother Sky and Aumgn but hey were obviously taken from the longer lp versions. Might satisfy somebody looking for a shorter version of the tracks though.
Songs often got considerably longer live too.

Very delicious cheese! I just think non-German cheese can be equally delicious... Robert, I do agree on Tago Mago overstaying its welcome a bit. I usually only listen through Halleluwah. My most listened to Can is probably Soon Over Babaluma.

"Smoked a haiku cigarette"

It's "Smoked a high cool cigarette"

Don't what's meant by "cheesy" in this context tbh

Don't know

"High cool cigarette" makes as little sense and is mave even cheesier! I don't really know what to say to make the cheesiness come alive for you... Does anyone else see the cheesiness in what I mentioned?

I'm with Tom. what do you mean by "cheesy"

I dunno... I think Malcolm Mooney sounds a little bit like a homeless dude who wandered into an open mic night. I LOVE him, don't get me wrong--and mave you're right, maybe "cheesy" is the wrong word, but I look askance at anyone who claims to never have raised an eyebrow in their early encounters with Malcom's or Damo's vocals...

http://www.gurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hands-on-head.gif

wasn't damo actually homeless when he joined?

all music is cheesy and corny, btw, my god.

He was a busker, not the same thing.

life is corny

except for the velvet underground. they're for real baby. syracuse university is a rough and tumble campus

I thought everyone was going to throw shit at me for saying I thought Tago Mago was far too long, but no thoughts? Anybody enjoy every single minute of it?

absolutely, it's my favorite. although for the first few years of owning it i mostly only listened to the first half.