The first 'space rock' on TV was Pink Floyd on Belgian TV in 1968 playing "Astronomy Domine," says Google (see/hear below). So if Pink Floyd were the sonic Big Bang of space rock in pop music history then David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in 1969 (still, basically, David Jones in this awards show appearance; also below) is the Epic of Gilgamesh of space rock.
Ground control to a guy in space, Major Tom, alienated and lonely in space, lamenting and/or enjoying the alienated distance, it's not clear, helplessly trusting the spaceship knows where to go, enjoying the ride in a pleasantly numb sort of way. Space is a virtual tabula rasa of alienation for freaks and geeks and outsiders and Bowie's their young clown prince stepping forward, their space rock blues singer, not even yet in space alien drag.
His eventual space alien personas arguably peak in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth in 1976. The plot is a broad farce of corporate rule and big moneyed corruption. Many scenes feel like inscrutable improvs and never add up to much. But Bowie the space alien has this thing for TVs, as many TVs as possible, and somehow manages to exude so much space alien weirdness, while at the same time this sympathetic ET-phone-home (six years before that movie) universal humanity. In the world of TMWFTE we're likely to find as much if not more humanity in space alien weirdos like Bowie. It's not the best anything but it is one of the better '70s doomsday and/or post-apocalyptic movies.
And "Space Oddity," 1969, as pop songs go, was on the one hand just another desperate stab at the charts timed around the Apollo moon landing, peaking at number 5 on the UK pop charts that year, but then eventually hit number 1 in 1975, and then number 1 in France and number 4 in the US in 2016, the year of Bowie's death. "Space Oddity" was also from the start so much more than just another pop hit. For one, it was this perfect songwriting distillation of psychedelia's fascination with space, space traveling, launching "Rocket Man," space aliens as a metaphor for freaks and social outcasts, launching 'space rock' poetics (arguably never equaled), and inspiring so many space rock creatives in various musical directions; his folkie space alien balladry, "Starman," Ziggy Stardust, crackerjack models of space alien glam rock (inspiring bands all the way up to Hedwig), krautrock experiments in Berlin, the post-punk Godfather's "Ashes to Ashes," confessing in the end Major Tom was a junkie ("junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low") all along. The number of versions of "Space Oddity," by Bowie alone, could fill out a double album. Bowie's song grew out of the baroque psych pop folktale stylings of the Bee Gees and Beatles, projecting that style into outer space. Inspiring Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" and The Who and Elton John and Queen and the Pet Shop Boys and D'Angelo, etc. But no one takes the lyrical possibilities of space rock further than Bowie, turning it into a language of teenage/artist alienation and freak solidarity.
Here's a super early live version, at an awards event, still in his standard-issue hippie David Jones style. The mild mannered audacity of the performance is impressive. He doesn't have another hit for three years, until he returns to the 'space rock' theme in "Starman."
Here's the full 'space rock' treatment from '72, the first version with Tony Visconti doing the production,
And another from '74 on Midnight Special in one of his several space alien getups and a glam rock peak,
I really completely lost touch after Let's Dance, 1983, I dunno, something about its inescapable commercial clout rubbed me the wrong way. Anyway, that was an unbelievably long time ago and I didn't go back to Bowie until Next Day (2013). The buzz from somewhere was enough to pique my curiosity. The punchy postpunk writing and the gritty band sound got me right away. I was so wowed at first that I began sampling those lost 30 years of albums, thinking there must be a bunch more good stuff in there I missed, but if there was I couldn't find much of it. Nevertheless, Next Day is a totally worthy 21st century successor to Low ('77) or Station to Station ('76). I was a little slower on the uptake with Blackstar (2016), the sound more amorphous, dark lounge jazzy things. But in the wake of his death, the songs grew on me and won out. "Blackstar" is his last nod to his space rock mythos. The dramatic agony of "Lazarus" evokes a kind of end-of-life purgatory. The sweet gratitude of "Girl Loves Me." Something about the essential mystery of Bowie's stardom in "I Can't Give Everything Away." What a swan song of a farewell album.
In his last nod to the 'space rock' subgenre, he insists he's not a gangster, not a film star, not a pop star, he's a Blackstar, he doesn't know why. He just is,
And here is Pink Floyd's possibly first space rock performance on TV,
The inspiration for these remarks on "Space Oddity" and Bowie come from my recent reading of Rob Sheffield's On Bowie, a gushing 200 page personal tribute to Bowie written shortly after his passing. I'm not even close to the maximalist on Bowie's music Sheffield is but the depth of his enthusiasm, like with Dreaming the Beatles, is winning. I especially liked that this gigantic icon of freak solidarity and liberation, Bowie, ended up happily married to the Black African model Iman, and how for all the wild drug adventures and artistic pretensions when you got down to it Bowie was always still David Jones, a mimic, a Cracked Actor, a Blackstar, et al, with a self-deprecating and humble sense of humor. And a space rock pioneer, Goth rock crooner, postpunk Godfather, and one of Brit psychedelia's greatest creations.
One of the secret sauces in the Beatles was that they were a vocal group with their own signature sound. They had that 'Northern tang,' coming from Liverpool, as Ian MacDonald once referred to their group vocal sound. Exhibit #1: "Baby's in Black," in Shea Stadium, '65, the squealing jet roar of the crowd of screaming teenies (and their concerned mothers), they sound vaguely off-key, straining, sweaty, and still somehow belt out a winning group vocal ode to "Baby's in Black."
And then under better circumstances here it is off The Beatles (1964). It's a songwriterly stylized vocal group version of the Everly Brothers doing a traditional country storytelling style ballad. The Beatles are rarely weird enough for Harry Smith's box treatment but "Baby's in Black" and "Yes It Is" ("if you wear red tonight") make a good case. Rough diamond Brit pop homages to American roots music standards, or in that vocal group style anyway. Lennon & McCartney.
I saw recently an educator I've respected for a long time extolling the great learning value of novels and fiction writing over non-fiction. Learners identify with characters better than analytical frameworks.
I've recognized something like this before as a weakness in my own career as a high school classroom teacher. I recall a student complaint once that I wasn't giving enough attention to the characters and "pageantry" of history. You know, the legendary heroes and ceremonial grandeur of history. Let's re-enact the characters signing the Magna Carta-- which might be a very good idea, by the way-- but not my teaching strength, for sure. Anyway, I know the nearly universal approval of, if not kindly tolerance for, my own classroom teaching style, for which I will always be grateful, is mostly attributable to student approval of me, a person, a personable character, school teacher, Mr. Thompson, far more than any appreciation for my content lessons in world history.
A breakdown of my own reading over the years, with minor variations at one time or another, is probably something like 50% non-fiction histories or social science-y books (with big bias for left populist critical theory), 25% books about popular music, and 25% novels or fiction. Accordingly, the juice in my own classroom teaching largely came from my enthusiasm for big picture social science-y takes on world history, political economy, economic trends, political power structures, cultural and sociological movements, big periodizing shifts in history: Bronze Age, Columbian Encounter, Industrial Revolution, Colonialism and Imperialism. I always tended to neglect the character-driven war stories and great men anecdotes; the general pageantry of kings and queens and their courts. The game of thrones. (1)
Character-driven narratives were never my strength in my own teaching but that didn't mean I didn't like them. I developed a big taste for historical fiction in books and movies and TV series once I started teaching, including now podcasts, more background stuff to read or look at while immersing myself in whatever historical time period.
Partly my predilection for big picture/Big History takes on world history is attributable to my limited brain powers. I found it far easier to hold onto the big structural outlines and questions than the scholarly details, names and dates, and particular biographical anecdotes and stories. But I also undoubtably gravitated towards the big picture stuff, the class analysis, the never-ending conspiracy of the rich against the poor, because my own origins are working class (non-college educated working class parents and grandparents, both sides) and the social justice stuff turned me on. Touched some built-in familial pride in me. I've never had any doubts that there is a class war going on, the systematic oppression of common working people, I saw it around me growing up and I recognized it immediately in history. Nor have I ever had any doubt about whose side I am on in the class war. If there are working class whites, including many in my extended family, that have been taken in by Trump's con it is they who have abandoned the side of working people. Not me. My reading of Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States in the late 1980s was a big awakening for me, a big Woke moment, and probably had as much to do with my getting into school teaching as any other book I've ever read. In short, I was teaching CRT in the public schools long before this fascist anti-Woke thing took over the country. And I always liked Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse, vilified by conservative bullies like Christopher Rufo, going way back.
Nevertheless, I have also always liked pop culture and novels and, especially once I began classroom teaching, character-driven historical fiction. So while I was lecturing in my tedious power-point bullet-point breakdown style for all those years (and which I truthfully and mercifully always strove to keep to a minimum) I actually developed quite a taste for good historical fiction. Good, meaning, believable or convincing characters and material conditions. My standards for believable or convincing were not literary or scholarly, of course. They were more public education generalist fan-boy of popular literary scholarship, with a big streak of lifelong fan-boy critic of the popular arts.
I draw the line with 90% of the costume dramas Hollywood produced in its golden age, 1940s to 1960s, for instance. Stagy and dead like museum dioramas. And basically unwatchable, or typically appreciated only for their camp pretensions. Which sweepingly dismisses museums and theater and the golden age of cinema, which isn't my intention or even without exception close to true. My point: There is a textural reality to the material conditions that I respond to; a grit, a realistic material texture to the history that I need to find in my historical fiction, book or movie. If it is there, this convincing historical visual or textural feel, it is often enough for me, even when the literary and/or dramatic standards of the characters is maybe a little lacking, or otherwise pretty cheesy or lousy. This goes for books or movies. Although the stiff, cardboard, predictable character problem might be a bigger weakness in TV/movies than books, or I've encountered more or it in TV/movies anyway.
Anyway, my appreciation for the convincing material reality of historical fiction is hardly scholarly. I'm vibing off whatever I've read about whatever history, responding to a visualization that is more imaginative and stylized than documentary. Although I'm applying some standards of verisimilitude I've internalized from the books I've read and the movies I've watched. My big hot take on the historical fiction scene, such as I know of it-- very limited-- is that there's way too much of it set in Europe and about the game of thrones stuff, dynastic monarchy succession wars, endless fratricide, a small court, probably 3-5% of the population max, vie for a secure place in the monopoly control of violent power, everyone else, "the little people" in Game of Thrones, the rest scrounge out an existence and try to stay out of the way and not be firebombed by the Queen's dragons. The politics of game of thrones is drearily familiar to politics today, unfortunately. But I often prefer historical fiction that brings to life and believably imagines the complex texture of other historical worlds, outside medieval Europe.
Amitav Ghosh's historical fiction, specifically, his Ibis Trilogy of books, set in India and China and the Indian Ocean Trade Network are a beautiful case in point. I was drawn to his books because of my interest in the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, 1839-1861, between Great Britain and China. An epic example of predatory capitalism in the very beginnings of capitalist rule, forcing on China the humiliation of foreign rule in a series of unequal treaties that lasted for the next century. Wars orchestrated by the British East India Company (EIC) and backed by the US and other Western imperialist interests, literally, explicitly, promising to take over China's trade in the name of "free trade." Specifically, free trade in opium that is spreading addiction and crisis in China. I think there are some historians who would still like to contend that "predatory capitalism" is leftist myth and there is no such thing in history. Really? The Opium Wars were "predatory capitalism," free market profits overwhelming better judgement and brutal and criminal in the disregard for human rights and national independence of others. Anyway, I ran across a reference to Ghosh's books somewhere, started with The Glass Palace (2005), which he says now was where his idea for the Ibis Trilogy came together for him, and was intrigued by the prospect of a South Asian take on the Opium Wars. Did not disappoint.
Sea of Poppies (2008): The Ibis is a British schooner, formerly a slave ship, being repurposed for transporting poor indentured laborers, girmityas, poor coerced labor, from India to Mauritius (a remote Indian Ocean island off the coast of Madagascar), and runs into a massive storm on the sea and faces mutiny. The Ibis sets off from Calcutta, capital of West Bengal, NE region of India, an urban center of early British opium production, ran by a department of the EIC (yes, really) called the Opium Department. Characters include Bihari peasant migrants from the north. A region where Ghosh grew up, and his parents had a peripheral relationship to the opium trade. Also, coincidentally, where George Orwell grew up, and his father was employed by the Opium Dept as well. You meet Bengali Zamindars, local landlords, some very rich and educated, subordinated and regularly humiliated by British agents of the Opium Dept. This was a big theme of The Glass Palace as well, although with less opium. In Sea of Poppies we meet a variety of merchant traders and govt officials from Europe, Indian Parsi (Persian) merchants and laborers, and Chinese merchants and laborers. And Lascars, sailors or soldiers employed by the British and other European colonizers, about half coming from the Indian subcontinent and the other half an incredibly diverse mix of sailors from SE Asia (Malays), the Middle East (Arabs), and Africans (Swahili), and could also include sailors of Japanese and Caribbean origins. The Lascars spoke a Chinese Pidgin English they adapted to their multilingual circumstances and were so ubiquitous in Indian Ocean maritime trade-- basically, because they were good sailors and very cheap-- that Western powers tried unsuccessfully to limit their employ. Not entirely unlike MAGA reaction against the ubiquity of poor immigrants in low-wage jobs today. Sea of Poppies highlights the similarities between slave and indentured labor systems in opium production and more broadly. The striking resemblance of indentured labor of plantations to slave labor in plantation agriculture. Ghosh has a sympathetic eye for poor peasants and Lascars and even the middling Zamindars, fallen nobility, trying to adapt to the colonial conditions of living with and under the British Empire. Includes romantic love between people from different classes, backgrounds, and the repressive conditions that oppose this cultural mixing.
River of Smoke (2011): This story is set in Canton, China, in the 13 Factories, the epicenter of the First Opium War, 1839-1842, and so in respect to the setting the most cinematic of the trilogy. This is the Pearl River Delta, the confluence of three great rivers, opening into the South China Sea; an area today that includes Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton), Schenzhen, Hong Kong and a Greater Bay Area urban conglomeration of 70 million people. The Pearl River Delta is a bustling southern port connecting China to SE Asia and the Indian Ocean Trade Network and the middle east, going back to the earliest centuries of the common era. River of Smoke is a complex portrait of this coastal trading port city and region at a specific point in this long history. The 19th century, 1830s, on the eve of the Opium Wars. And, specifically, it's about how the imperial state of China, the Qing Dynasty, has since the mid-18th century tried to restrict the increasingly disruptive forces of foreign trade to this port region with a system of trade known as the Canton Factories; or 13 Factories, which by the time of the Opium Wars numbered more like 17 or 18 factories. They weren't really factories in the sense we think of factories as buildings enclosing manufacturing operations. The different factories were like embassies or compounds based on the national origin of the trade: British (EIC), Dutch (VOC), American, French, Spanish, etc. They were trading posts: big port warehouses in the ground floor, with second floor living quarters for the foreign traders. And these factories were where these foreigners were supposedly for the most part physically restricted. Local Chinese merchants, rich and well connected, served as factory hosts or landlords. For all the restrictions, however, there are a handful of British and American traders, known affectionately as "Canton graduates," making huge dynastic fortunes of wealth from selling opium to China via the factory system. And then around them swirls a wildly diverse network of characters caught up in the trade in opium and interactions with the factories: foreign traders, local Chinese merchants, agents of the EIC, local boat people, adventuring (if not desperate) zamindars from India, lascars from the vast Indian Ocean Trade Network, fugitive indentured laborers (read: contractual slaves, basically), a mixed-race American, European botanical scholars. It's a complex menagerie of peoples. All trying to profit from and/or live with this terrible trade. And all living and working amidst many tens of thousands, 90% plus of the population (2), trying to survive this hurly-burly of commerce, if not suffer enslavement to it. The Dan people (or Tanka), a local people indigenous to the Pearl River Delta, have been barred by imperial China, the Qing, from building on land, and live and do their business on islands of small boats or junks in the tens of thousands (boats and people) tied together and floating in the river. Forming a floating island of a Red Light district of opium dens and brothels and cheap labor and links to illegal trade. Scorned by local Cantonese landlubbers, with the possible exception of the Chinese merchants (and foreign traders, of course) who employ and profit off them. The main action of the story is the convergence of all these people, groups, cultures, conjoining and competing interests on the eve of the Opium Wars. The details are too many for my powers of recollection but, nonetheless, give a rich, vivid, textural depth and complexity to the location of the opening battles in the Opium Wars. The Pearl River Delta, Canton, China. The dramatic setting is where foreign trade took over China in the mid-19th century and where China has now possibly taken over foreign trade in the 21st century, or a super big chunk of it anyway, a global convergence zone of staggering scale.
Flood of Fire (2015): The final installment in the series has all the big historical build-up events to the Opium Wars, the Qing crackdown on the opium trade, dumping tons of opium into the Pearl River, burning down the factories, and the British establishment of Hong Kong and the unequal treaties, reducing China to colonial subjects carved up by Western powers. But the battle scenes, the fires consuming the factories, are brief, if vivid and dramatic. The main action is all the multicultural interactions and conflicts in the characters of the Ibis Trilogy brought together by the opium trade, coming to head, destroying lives and birthing new more complex and multicultural ones at the same time. A Hindi woman runs away from sati sacrifice for her deceased husband, eloping with a lower-caste indentured servant, cursing her brother's life for her betrayal of the strict Indian caste order. Similarly, an Indian Parsi (Persian) woman, looking for the 'illegitimate' child of her late husband, a successful Parsi merchant in China, hooks up with an Armenian man, and emotionally wrestles with the condemnation of her orthodox Parsi community. A mixed (quadroon) American, Zachary Reid, passes as white to advance his opportunities in the factory trade system. Indian fugitives from the EIC's colonial justice live on the precarious margins of the opium trade. Hong Kong begins as a multicultural trading post committed to parasitically profiting off the poisoning of China with opium.
Overall, the Ibis Trilogy is a sympathetic and cinematic portrayal of a bunch of underdog characters in the Indian Ocean Trade Network, subalterns, lascars, fallen zamindars, and various well-intentioned scholarly adventurers (like Ghosh, undoubtably) caught up in the tumult of the opium trade and Opium Wars. Great stuff but hadn't thought too much about the series again until hearing about Ghosh's Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories (2023) from the Empire podcast. I'm not a completist with the Empire podcast by any stretch buts lots of great topics, like this one on the Opium Wars called "Victorian Narcos." Also, Empire is always good for reading references in various topics in world history. At any rate, Smoke and Ashes is Ghosh's memoir about writing the Ibis Trilogy. I actually began the book with a little trepidation, because the Ghosh book I've enjoyed least in the five books by him I've got to so far was the only other nonfiction memoir book I've read by him. Maybe I'll find his nonfiction work tedious, I feared. But not so with Smoke and Ashes.
On the surface the book is a recent review of the historical literature Ghosh researches for the Ibis Trilogy, including research that has appeared since he finished Flood of Fire in 2015. The breadth and scale of his immersion in this historical material is impressive and his translations of that research a pleasure to read, or for a retired high school teacher anyway. I often find vernacular speech in historical texts a big obstacle, laboriously stilted, but Ghosh finds ways to make pidgin sound musical and find poetic concision in bits of various foreign languages. But his review of the historical literature, including post-2015 work, grows into several polemics that I found fascinating.
1. While the West's influence in India is overt and ideological, China's influence was embedded in everyday material practices and not the dominant political discourse. For example, Tea (Chai), Porcelain (Chinemati), Sugar (Cheeni), and Peanuts (Chinebadam), common everyday features of Indian life where Ghosh grew up. But in conversation China is typically a hostile neighbor or a closed society that the world hopes to open up like any other extractive colonial resource, like India had been, frequently reducing China to a degrading caricature. You cannot read an account of the Opium Wars without recognizing the deeply humiliating historical source of the CPC's fierce insistence on national independence or why this would have so much pull with China's people. Or why China would suspect Britain's and the West's intentions regarding their right to self-determination. China resists the coercive force of private global capital today because they bitterly remember being humiliated subjects of private global capital not all that long ago. But leaning so heavily on dominating export trade, as China is today, without also cultivating domestic demand and the living standards of their own working classes is bound to cost more and more over time in police state repressive measures. Presumably at some point simply increasing police state vigilance and AI surveillance will not be enough to quell bottom-up energies wanting better living conditions, the forces of Polanyi's democratic double-movements. See Foxconn worker suicides, etc. One of the headline stories about China over the last generation has been about how China's economic miracle has so radically reduced global poverty. But people's desires won't be satisfied forever with having barely escaped desperate poverty, of course. And the CPC knows this. This is practically a foundational cliche of elite panic in world history. To Malthus, feeding the poor, subsidizing them at all, only leads to sloth and idleness. The poor quit work as soon as they can, turning to drink and making babies they cannot feed. The CPC-- and market fundamentalists in the West like Malthus-- want to keep the working classes as close to bare subsistence survival as possible. Strong enough to work but not so strong and free that they might agitate for more; better wages, or better living conditions. More luxury consumer goods, more vacation and time off work, etc. Repressing these democratic energies costs a state a lot of money. Almost an axiom of the world history I know says the poor will put up with a lot of oppression and tyranny, astonishing amounts, but in the long run internal police state crackdowns are no more stable than the colonial and imperialist great power bullying that ended in world wars in the 20th century. Neither contributes to positive and peaceful cooperation and both almost always end in violent and cataclysmic confrontations in which a lot of people get hurt or killed.
2. Opium might be the ultimate destructive sin good or natural predatory capitalist commodity? Ghosh makes the case, anyway. Tobacco, alcohol, sugar, processed foods, gambling, all tremendously popular, but are their impacts as bad as that of opium and the poppy? Maybe alcohol or gambling are rivals? Is there any other addictive drug more popular than those derived from the opiates extracted from the poppy plant? Opium, Morphine, Codeine, Heroin, Oxycodone? Ghosh claims no natural plant substance is more common in modern medicines, pharmaceuticals, than opiates. So popular that fentanyl is actually a synthetic lab creation of an opiate-like drug that promised to be less addictive than the natural plant opiate derivatives but turned out to be maybe more addictive. In mild and moderate forms opiates are a remarkably effective pain killer. To poor suffering Indian and Chinese physical laborers opium was virtually irresistible, enabling them to work longer hours despite their aggravating aches and pains. Consumed addictively its long-term effects are corrosive and withering, if not worse. Ghosh credits opium as being an "Agent of History" and attributes to it a natural power and force that humans imagine they can control but they cannot. Although, encouragingly, he points out that China was able to finally subdue the plague of opium addiction, not by penalizing addicts but by shutting down and strictly controlling its production.
3. Ghosh calls Britain's Opium Wars a "model of the colonial Narco-state" and finds striking parallels with the opioid crisis in the modern US. The EIC forced mass cultivation of the poppy in India, via the Opium Dept, and funneled the drug to vulnerable populations in China, people facing brutal labor conditions and joblessness and chronic food insecurity. Similarly, the opioid epidemic in the modern US exploded in economically vulnerable conditions, rural areas, old mining towns and de-industrialized rust-belt regions of America. The EIC used gunboat diplomacy in the Opium Wars to force China to accept the drug trade and pay reparations when China attempted to ban it. The immense profits from the opium trade built great domestic fortunes in Britain and the US (Astors, Forbes, Roosevelts), fueling industrialization, and shaping Western institutions, while government officials and merchants looked the other way. In modern America, pharmaceutical giants like Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family replicated this playbook on a corporate scale, buying off regulators at the FDA, buying off doctors to push pills, and buying off lawmakers to protect their companies from legal consequences. When the opium trade devastated Chinese families, British and Western opium traders blamed the addicts, arguing that the Chinese were inherently degenerate, corrupt, or weak-natured, and that the opium traders were just meeting demand. Again, modern drug marketers and drug policies in the 1990s recycled this exact colonial template, stigmatizing addicts as sick and depraved and pinning the blame primarily on desperate consumers rather than the drug cartels and producers (visit relevant threads on the social media site Next Door sometime if you doubt this common blaming-the-addicts take). Ghosh sees in the modern opioid crisis a kind of blowback from the Opium Wars of the colonial Narco-states. The West treating poor Chinese workers with such contempt and disdain in the 19th c. boomerangs back on their own working classes, without, again, destroying the actual sources of the problem, predatory corporate interests; Purdue Pharma or the Sacklers, etc.
Anyway, Ghosh argues the Opium Wars and the Opioid Crisis are textbook cases of predatory capitalism. I have great respect for Kenneth Pomeranz's book The Great Divergence, a big history book I wrote about here. His study proved in withering detail that the West did not achieve any great divergence before 1850, and wild claims that the West was in every way ascendent and dominant by 1492 or even earlier are nonsense. In terms of actual material living conditions, living standards, lifespans, luxury consumption, the West does not achieve any great divergence with the developed parts of the East, China, India, or Japan until 1850 or thereafter. But Pomeranz's failure to recognize the Opium Wars as pivotal and emblematic of this humiliating transition was I think a copout; like his snarky dismissal of historian Walter Rodney's evidence suggesting the slave trade and plantation economy subsidized the industrial revolution in Europe. Of course it fucking did. This is part of common trend in US historiography to gloss over the industrial revolution, to omit the humanitarian crimes of predatory capitalism and imperialism in the 19th century, or sweep them under the rug as the necessary social costs of free market and capitalist progress. Ghosh's postcolonial historical fiction wants to pull back the rug and expose the grinding poverty and destruction of the colonial and imperialist enterprises, the bitter counterpoint to its centrifugal, multicultural, and modernizing effects.
Footnotes:
1. Game of Thrones (2011-2019) and House of the Dragon (2022-2026). Let me state from the outset that this taste I have developed for historical fiction does have its downsides. I have a weakness for historical costume dramas, as mentioned. If a movie or TV series presents any reasonably believable vision of whatever historical period, has that gritty, convincing, realism I want, crave, I'm game. So I watched Game of Thrones. And now the House of the Dragon. I like their look and feel; some have called it "medieval realism." If nothing else, the series vividly realizes the extreme conditions of pre-modern social inequality (see my second note). The little people, they are repeatedly called, live in rags and squalor and hand to mouth. And the relentlessly plotting and scheming of the royal courts, dynastic families and their hired Hands, the center of nearly all the action, is a deadly game of thrones, of incest and fratricide, to secure succession and power. This is a near universal feature of ancient kingdoms and monarchies, as far as I know the history. And I like the way they compress the wider world around Westeros (the British Isles) with touches of fantasy. Martin's Wall holding back the northern menace. Dragons that operate like WMD's, devastating populations with something like Byzantine "Greek Fire." But I have my limits with the fantasy stuff as well. I found the Ice Zombies in the original series tedious real fast. And by the end of this series the political dynamics were so reductively predictable. A royal female heir wants to bring peace and spread prosperity to the kingdom, realizing the dreams of a benevolent dead king ancestor, but the always nearly psychotic ambitions of other possible heirs, mostly men, of course, drive the queen in the end to firebomb the people with dragons. Subduing the kingdom by destroying its people. Again. This was the brutal turn of the last season of the original series. And now the House of the Dragon, a prequel, repeats the formula, as if to say this is how it always goes: Monarchal rule for peace and prosperity is always undermined by the cutthroat and brutal game of thrones over royal succession, by patriarchal gender norms and psychotic power mad men. Probably not all that far from the truth but drearily predictable and all the contenders to the throne in House of the Dragon are grotesque caricatures. I was hardly paying attention by the end. The prequel was mercifully only three seasons, compared to the original's eight seasons, but I still think a bit of a let down.
2. This reminds me of French world historian Fernand Braudel's book, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century. Again, in withering detail, Braudel makes the case that the everyday life of 93-95% of people in the early modern period (1450-1750) living within reach of a city or town, urban agricultural civilization (he piles on the evidence from Europe but adds case examples from places like China and India and Japan as well), are laboring peasants living off gruel and what hardscrabble social life they can hang onto in grindingly impoverished conditions. No wonder then the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, American and French, are such a radical break in world history. Not so much in generating any immediate change to those miserable material conditions-- Piketty laments in one of his books that 100 years after the French Revolution much of the wealth in France was still concentrated in the top 5-7% of the population-- but because the liberal promises of the progressive era go back to the democratic revolutions. One of Piketty's big points is progressive policy change in governments take off in the late 19th century (social insurance, income taxes, antitrust, etc) long before the cataclysm of the world wars in the 20th c, as some historians argue was necessary prelude to significant progressive change, and a long time before the New Deal 1930s. Anyway, the rhetoric that fuels those progressive policy claims, the liberal promises to the 93-95% that began to gain traction in the late 19th century were rooted in the democratic revolutions of the 18th century. Or you could argue they go back to the Enlightenment writers in the 17th century but the democratic revolutions turned their words and academic claptrap into a political cause and movements for liberal democratic individual rights and equal legal protections, self-determination, national sovereignty, and a system of laws protecting human rights and freedoms, that have inspired liberal political movements ever since. And, unfortunately, also inspired a conservative reaction as well, blood and soil, racist bigot reaction opposed to extending liberal rights protections to poor immigrants, minorities, women, or even workers. Anybody they don't like, basically.
Musical Coda: Up there with Ravi Shankar as my favorite Indian or South Asian music artist. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pakistani, musician, singer, composer, most associated with a style of Sufi Islamic devotional music but was also master of Hindustani classical music. Kinetic beats, cycling mantric chanting vocal intensity, harmoniums, long build ups and ecstatic drum circle like peaks. Huge influence on South Asian popular music. He got big in global world music circles when he recorded some albums for Peter Gabriel's Real World Records beginning in 1989. He was a resident scholar in the musicology department at the University of Washington in 1993 and 1994. He makes global dance music with an unparalleled spiritual intensity, and the kind of cultural mixing energies always a part of the South Asian experience and evoked by the Ibis Trilogy.
Random notes on Chapter 3: Kraftwerk and the Electrification of Modern Music from Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany by David Stubbs (2014)
Many Germans probably object to the krautrock moniker for the obvious reason it is an ethnic slur. Equivalent to, say, calling British rock Limey-rock or French rock Frog-rock. And coming from Brits (John Peel, Ian Macdonald, or Brit advertisers used the krautrock term first, it's not entirely clear) probably makes the term an even more annoying dig to a German. But another objection to the krautrock label could be that a lot of the early records that get thrown into that marketing bucket were not in fact very rockin' or rock-like music at all.
Much of krautrock in its heyday, 1968-1975, was more instrumental, soundtrack-like sounds, more ambient, more post-rock, or even anti-rock. Can and Faust owe obvious musical debts to the Velvet Underground. So rock music. Schmidt says the presence of vocalists Mooney and Suzuki in Can's early years decisively turns the band's music towards rock. Sometimes I can mistake Amon Duul ii for a Brit prog rock band. But Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster, and Klaus Schultz, the latter a pervasive figure on the experimental ambient instrumental soundtrack side of krautrock in its beginnings, called a compilation of their music that came out in 1972, Kosmische Musik (or 'cosmic music'). And Kraftwerk, originally calling themselves the Organisation, are the models or pop kings, the "Showroom Dummies" of this more electronic and downtempo ambient side-- and possibly more revolutionary side?-- of krautrock. (1)
Kraftwerk were formed in Dusseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider. I think I've always thought of them as a group I admire more for their influences than their actual music. Devo, Talking Heads, New Order, and The KLF, all obviously influenced by Kraftwerk, are personal faves. Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother of Neu! begin in Kraftwerk, and as I've mentioned before Dinger was a major influence on Kraftwerk's version of the motorik sound. No doubt Kraftwerk were true pioneers of electronic music, synth-pop, Goth, electro, EDM, or really almost any other flavor of electronic pop music. Gary Numan's "Cars" (1979). Human League's "Don't You Want Me" (1981). Martin Gore of Depeche Mode credits Kraftwerk as the "godfathers" of electronic pop music. Their legacy is remarkably widespread. But my first teen exposure to Kraftwerk was more passive and relatively indifferent. I had a school friend that played the Autobahn album all the time. That song and "Showroom Dummies," about the only Kraftwerk songs I remember from the '70s, were funny and I kind of liked them as a novelty songs but I didn't like them enough to buy their albums.
The first Kraftwerk single I actually got physically excited about and went out and purchased was a 12" single version of "Tour de France," which appeared prominently in the 1984 hiphop movie Breakin'. The song is now known widely as Breakdance, as in the song origin of breakdance music. They put out an album called Tour de France Soundtracks in 2003, elaborating on the EDM associations in Kraftwerk's electronic sound. It was actually hiphop founding godfather Afrika Bambaataa's praise of Kraftwerk in the early '80s that got me to eventually give Kraftwerk a second and closer listen.
Trans-Europe Express (1977) is perhaps their best, my favorite anyway, an electronic road/train song theme or two and a seamlessly gloomy electro Goth soundtrack. On the album "Hall of Mirrors" is a dramatic prelude to "Showroom Dummies," the song I'd only known as a radio single. And the whole second side, "Trans-Europe Express," "Metal on Metal," "Abzug," "Franz Schubert," and "Endless Endless" melds into one immaculately dark synth-pop suite of music. Their rock and anti-rock tendencies in perfect tension.
That said all their peak run of albums in retrospect, Autobahn (1974) to Computer World (1981), have their moments and seem to effectively burnish Kraftwerk's robotics and cybernetics pop mystique one way or another. I can see Kraftwerk fans getting behind any one of these five albums, preference based mostly on timing, when and how they came to find the album. I think another old music pal used to rank Computer World (1981) his favorite Kraftwerk album in more or less these terms. And "Numbers," off that album, is a touchstone for early '80s Detroit techno and all kinds of later '90s EDM. Carl Craig, second wave Detroit techno pioneer, said of this vintage of Kraftwerk, "they were so stiff they were funky." Anyway, "Numbers" in the early '80s Black dance music context is not to be missed.
To be honest, though, in my most recent check-in with the Kraftwerk catalog I still found myself reaching most for Kraftwerk's first two experimental albums, the least familiar to me, and especially Kraftwerk 2 (1972). No motorik tempos, more flute, even some guitar; absolutely minimum words, strictly experimental and generally chaotic. Meandering and slow building jams eventually reach these momentary peaks and then recede again like the tide. Maybe a precursor to Einstürzende Neubauten, the '80s German industrial band? Lots of bell ringing clanks and industrial like atmospherics anyway. Hypnotic and, again, vaguely psychedelic.
I never caught up with Kraftwerk's funky appeal until late but can see now their dark gothic melodicism, always in evidence, was maybe their greatest lasting influence. Anyway, they were a significant influence on Goth and hiphop and electro and EDM, that's a pretty impressive legacy. But I guess I'm still admiring them most for their influence and not how personally satisfying I find playing their records.
Footnotes:
1. Apparently, later, Schulz is dismissive of the 'kosmiche musik' name as too corny and sci-fi. Hawkwind indulge in this even worse-- corny sci-fi allusions, I mean-- but like 'space rock' I think 'cosmic music' fits. Or fits as well or better in many instances as krautrock, anyway. Psychedelic tinged German instrumental soundtrack music circa 1968-1975.
2. Full disclosure, Bam, an old school hiphop music favorite, has now posthumously, he died in April, been charged with sexual abuse of several under age boys. Ugh.
The NY Times put together this list of 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters last spring and people got mad about it on substack. Some jazz piano guy I don't know wrote this screed about the travesty of Billy Joel not making the list when pop drivel like Taylor Swift did. I wasn't surprised by another old geezer hating on Swift's music. I know old guys who bristle at the mere mention of her name. Why? They feel obligated to like her music and they're rebelling against that obligation is my pop psychology take. This is a reflex in all old people, or dad rock era types anyway, and it's magnified by Swift's massive popularity. By contrast, I'm no Swiftie by any stretch, but I am as senior citizen too and I like a lot of Taylor Swift's music.
So the hating on TS part of the reaction wasn't surprising to me but someone stumping hard for Joel as an all-time great songwriter? That I did not expect. I actually have a soft spot for Joel's Glass Houses (1980). A timing thing, mostly: "Glass Houses" was New Wave when I thought that was a new and cool and fun exciting thing. I knew Joel had a couple big chart songs in the '70s as well. Undeniably big pop songs and still those kind of big pop songs, I'll add, that sound gratingly overplayed if I'm not in the right mood. Anyway, I've maybe never heard any of his albums after Glass Houses and only know any of his later stuff by its exposure on the radio, none of which left any impression. I know he got married to the model Christie Brinkley at some point and, I guess, assumed he lived happily ever after in Florida, playing at the elegantly appointed piano bar in his house. Anyway, easy call for me, Swift over Joel.
But these lists are so damn divisive online. The NY Times list does specify 'living' songwriters, so the list was at least a little bit like those retrospective appreciations at the Academy Awards. A primary objective, presumably, was to honor special artists, songwriters, before they die. Billy Joel is getting up there. Swift is in her 30s. So now by preferring Swift's music in this comparison I'm picking on another old guy!
By my count 22 of the 30 songwriters on the list, several of the 30 songwriters are two or three person songwriting teams, fit my crude lifetime achievement award criteria: over 50, most of their hits scored in the 20th century; 1960s-1990s. Of the eight 21st century songwriters that make the list, Swift, Fiona Apple, Bad Bunny, a Brandy Clark trio of country songwriters, Kendrick Lamar, Lana Del Ray, Romeo Santos, and Young Thug, I'm guessing a better case for Joel could have been made against several of these young songwriting contenders. Guessing because I don't know Santos at all, and Bad Bunny very little. And, from what I do know, elevating Young Thug over Rakim or The Bomb Squad or Eminem or J. Cole or Prince Paul or Noname, and probably many others I can't think of right now, does not speak well for the state of contemporary hiphop or at least its critical appreciation. And Apple and Lamar are personal favorites, so I wouldn't recommend challenging them. Or why not argue for Joel over Diane Warren or Mariah Carey, two legacy inclusions whose songwriting claims strike me as suspect at best?
In fact, I maybe come to this list with some antiquated ideas about songwriting. I was thinking songwriting was mostly about the words or the word-smithing aspects of songwriting. So I never thought of Niles Rodgers or Babyface or Jam & Lewis (although I see now they get credit for co-writing Janet Jackson's "When I Think of You," which I've always adored) as songwriters so much as musicians and record producers. I love Rodger's Chic and think they are still criminally underrated, failing to get into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for years, but I would never contend words or lyrics were Rodger's or Chic's strong suit. Nor Mariah Carey, for that matter. I always thought the generic quality to her hooks were a major weakness. I don't like Paul Simon's music much but I at least recognize word-smithing is his thing; "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," etc. It seems like the NY Times list was conflating songwriting with hit making.
Not that I mean to suggest I'm some great judge of songwriting. I can't recite lyrics and with most my favorite pop songs I connect with little more than a hook chorus or hook phrase or two of words. And as I've pointed out before, my listening preferences have only drifted further away from any appreciation of words or lyrics in music as I get older. But I still like to listen to good songwriting, words and music, now and then and I still think the NY Times list leans way too much on the charts and thereby undervalues the actual art of songwriting lyrics. I mean, Smokey Robinson, Missy Elliot, Stephin Merritt, sure, but Mariah Carey and Lionel Richie? Really?
Nearly every music person I know has a favorite living songwriter not on this list, including: Swamp Dogg, George Clinton, Randy Newman, Jonathan Richman, Tom Waits, Todd Rundgren, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Kate Bush, Madonna, Paul Westerberg, Mekons, Lauryn Hill, PJ Harvey, Boots Riley, Amy Rigby, Jason Isbell, Vincent Neil Emerson, Bill Calahan, etc. Anyway, my point is there's a lot of them. And, admittedly, as I rattle them off I realize added difficulties for the poor rock/pop critics at the NY Times: who is still living anyway (I wasn't sure about Rundgren and had to look it up) and only Americans (so no Neil Young or Bush or Mekons or Harvey, I was getting carried away there), but still their list, a little ironically given it's the top of journalism's word-smithing hierarchy, seems to belittle the actual art of songwriting lyrics.
And here's another case in point: James McMurtry. Son of western novelist Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, etc), a songwriting words or lyrics guy born and bred. And whom I recently saw at the Tractor Tavern.
Going I wondered aloud to a friend whether my relative unfamiliarity with McMurtry's entire 14 album catalog might hurt my experience hearing him live. McMurtry's baritone on record is a little pedestrian, it won't break any hearts, but live its rich and gravelly clarity is a perfect storytelling instrument. Even the songs I knew revealed more in person.
I first became aware of McMurtry's "We Can't Make It Here." (2005), making the rounds during the Great Recession by word of mouth or music critics. His first album is called Too Long in the Wasteland (1989), and it was produced by John Cougar Mellencamp. It's a model of that '80s rock sound that took over or at least expanded the palette of popular country music in the '90s. His guitar guy, Tim Holt, adds an exquisite drony thickness to a jangly Americana sound. McMurtry put out a single in 2015 called "Forgotten Coast." His last three albums, Complicated Game (2015), the Horse and the Hounds (2021), and The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy (2025), might reflect a more mature McMurtry, more big picture, more philosophical.
The place, "here," in his songs could be anywhere, Austin, San Antonio, Alaska, Coeur d'alene, Florida, Detroit, the Rust Belt deaths-of-despair deindustrialization that appeared in the 1980s and turned into an opioid epidemic in the '90s and metastasized into a political movement in the 2010s. McMurtry is the drifter trying to get by, trying not to get pulled under, every now and then hitting on these perfect song postcards from the wasteland.
Recorded in 1981, a foundational record of Techno and EDM ('80s and '90s) music genres. Exudes that hypnotic chill-out vibe that would become pervasive in '90s dance music. Gottsching has some classical training on guitar but turned to improvisatory rock in the 1970s, forming Ash Ra Temple with Klaus Schulz (Tangerine Dream) in 1971. More pioneering krautrockers. If you like minimalism or Eno and Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1981, same year as this record, you will like this. High-speed electric train to Nirvana. Om or Aum!
from Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany by David Stubbs
My music listening life can be split into three phases that probably resemble roughly the experience of many. My earliest phase when I heard whatever records my parents happened to play and I eventually discovered Top 40 and the radio. My second phase, which I’m going to call my rock snob phase, takes off somewhere between 1977 and 1979, when I discover a music press, go to college, move into the city, and begin to fancy myself a learned student of rock and pop music and its history. This phase lasted until the early ‘90s for me when I got married and started school teaching, launching a phase when music became, again, primarily a background listening experience. I remember a student once commenting that all their social studies teachers had a thing for African music, like me. I balked at the stereotype then but think now it does get at something essential about the liberal internationalist character of the last Dad Rock phase in my music listening. Retiring might mark another new phase in my music listening but I don’t have enough perspective yet to tell for sure.
At any rate, Chapter 2 in David Stubbs’ Future Days profiles Krautrock flag bearers Can. Can was a German experimental rock band formed in Cologne in 1968. They improvise a blend of psychedelia, progressive jazz-rock, funk, studio electronics and tape editing into these long and drawn-out and slightly robotic proto-worldmusic grooves. I don’t keep up with the rock snob press very well anymore but I gather Can’s stock has risen considerably in the 21st century and they also happen to fit perfectly several of my ‘dad rock’ music listening inclinations. Making this a great time to linger over some Can records again.
As I mentioned in my blurb about Chapter 1, Stubbs frames Krautrock as born out of 1968 student protest movements. But Can, like Amon Duul, weren’t hanging out with the Red Army Faction. They were a more a middle-class cultural response to the spirit of ’68, maybe akin to the drop out hippie movement in the states. Can originally setup their recording studio in a retreat-like castle outside Cologne, like Faust in an old and abandoned schoolhouse in a rural setting or Cluster in their converted German farmhouse. Amon Duul, both versions, grew out of a hippie commune.
Foremost, though, the US model for Can were Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. Their name is a play on Warhol’s 1962 painting exhibition of 32 Campbell Soup Can flavors. Irmin Schmidt, co-founding member, visited NYC in the mid-‘60s, hanging out around La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate, which included the Velvet’s John Cale and others. And the group’s first band name, and name for all their subsequent recording studios (in another nod to their affiliation with hippie psychedelia), was Inner Space. The two sides of Can from the start are Pop art pretensions and classic hippie era, 1968-1972, psychedelia.
What the original German musical acts we’re calling krautrockers (this is contested too, of course, and probably something I’ll take up at some point) called their own music was “Kosmische Musik,” or ‘cosmic music’ or, in other words, psychedelic music.
Stubbs celebrates Can’s remarkable collective achievement and then their mushrooming influence since their heyday (1968 to 1973, or 1975, or 1979, YMMV).
In the beginning the four or five principles get together, hang out in their Inner Space studio for long hours, days on end, jamming and improvising with studio electronics and tape editing effects. No one came to the studio with finished songs; they improvised their songs together in the studio. Schmidt brags that everyone in Can got credit for song compositions and attributes the decline of Can recordings in the mid-‘70s to this collective bond in the band cracking and beginning to break down.
When "Mother Sky" is all you need. Can, 1970.
And then understandably Stubbs marvels even more at the mushrooming influence and legacy of Can since the 1970s, spreading from Joy Division/New Order to The Fall's Mark E. Smith to the Eurhythmics to The Orb to Radiohead to Stereolab to LCD Soundsystem to Pavement and Tame Impala and on and on. Can have evolved into a pioneering prototype of a post-punk musical intersection combining DIY rock band collaboration with electronics and ambient music and an infatuation with global beats. Again, a rock snob and dad rock marriage made in heaven, or in my mind anyway.
Seems relevant to note from the outset three of four of the Fab Four band members in Can were pushing or already 30 in 1968, when they first started playing together.
Schmidt, keyboards, and founding musical direction guy in the band, with no shortage of strong opinions, was already doing successful musical production soundtrack work for TV and movies when Can formed. His professional experience is also why Can’s first two albums are titled Monster Movies and Soundtracks (1969). A lot of their earliest recordings were originally produced for TV and movie soundtracks. For this reason, some discographies won’t include Soundtracks with Can’s other proper albums. One of Can’s earliest mission statements, articulated by Schmidt, is a sneering disdain and opposition to schlager music, with which I am no expert but understand is sentimental and sweet pop hits widely popular in Germany and Scandinavian countries at the time. I imagine Abba as an uber-ultra model of schlager music but I’m not really sure? I’ve never followed the Eurovision song contest and only know the Will Ferrell comedy. Anyway, Schmidt avowedly formed Can in opposition to schlager-ish commercial pop music, whatever exactly that was in 1968 Germany. And he also had a thing about not wanting Can associated with the British progressive groups, repeatedly emphasizing Can’s more important affinities with minimalism and James Brown and the Velvets and Andy Warhol.
It’s not clear how much Schmidt’s vision for Can reflects that of the other guys in the band but it brings out the art rock foundations of Can’s formation. Schmidt and co-founder, bassist and master sound experimentation and tape editor, Holger Czukay, both studied together with electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen in the early 1960s. Stockhausen means musically, in short: musique concrete or taped found sounds or already existing passages of music chopped up, looped, and manipulated electronically. Miles Davis and an astonishing number of prog rockers cite Stockhausen’s influence on their music in the early ‘70s. Maybe above all others, a Stockhausen recording put out in 1959 called “Gesang Der Junglinge” or “Song of the Youths” was very influential.
Significantly, Schmidt insists that Can has nothing to do with British prog rock but Can shares Stockhausen’s and prog rock’s penchant for drones and minimalist repetition and soundtrack ambience and an epic and/or hypnotically indulging, shall we say, approach to song length. Again, like the Velvets, Can’s “Yoo Doo Right,” on their '69 debut, Monster Movies, lasts over 20 minutes, surpassing “Sister Ray” at 17 and a half minutes in 1968, although both will soon enough be crushed by prog rock monster track monoliths like Jethro Tull’s 43-44 minute long “Thick as a Brick” or Michael Oldfield’s 60 minutes long “Amorak.” Apparently, Stockhausen has a piece of music that lasts for almost 29 hours. Anyway, by the late ‘70s Brit prog rockers are playing on Can’s last albums, guys who formerly played with Brit prog rockers Traffic.
The guitarist, Michael Karoli, the youngster in the core quartet, and the only member of the quartet that fits the rock star model, reportedly introduced Czukay to the Beatles’ “I am the Walrus,” which opened Czukay up to the avant-garde collage and studio manipulation possibilities in pop music. Eventually, Karoli travels in North Africa, especially Morocco, sharpening Can’s interest in non-Western rhythms, hypnotic trance and modal repetition. His guitar style, echoed later by post-punkers like PIL's Keith Levine or Amerindie groups like the Feelies and Vampire Weekend, shares an affinity with the bright, trilling, trebly guitar sounds of North/West Africa.
Finally, driving the core quartet of Can musicians, is drummer Jaki Liebezeit. I’m fully behind Stubbs and Schmidt’s arguments that the key to Can’s musical achievements were the collaborative and improvisatory group setup. Can is a sum greater than its parts, this is born out in how none of the band members solo work I’ve heard compares with Can’s classics or even their post-Mooney-Suzuki records. Like the Beatles, like the Velvet Underground, like many of the greatest bands, the sum was greater than its individual parts with Can. But if I had to identify only one musician in that core Can quartet of musicians as MVP, the guy who raised their sound above just another early ‘70s jazz rock fusion band, of which there were many in that day mind you, it’s Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming.
His beats are always center, simple, metronomic but tricky and funky. Leading the way, Liebezeit pushes the tempo in Can music and creates the center of the band's sound around which the other guy’s riff and improv. He manages to simultaneously evoke traditional drumbeats and global rhythms with a signature clipped machine-like precision and relentlessness. Although that doesn't quite tell the whole story either.
Liebezeit is frequently credited, along with Kraftwerk and Neu’s drummer Klaus Dinger, and I’d throw in there as well Faust’s drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, with inspiring the trademark motorik sound: a relentless, machine-like drumming style associated with the emergence of Krautrock. But Liebezeit is more than the motorik sound. The popular model of the motorik sound, Kraftwerk’s 1974 track, “Autobahn,” is literally an electronic transcription of Dinger’s exuberant drumming style, according to co-founder Ralf Hutter. Liebezeit’s signature drum sound is really a combo of that relentless tribal trance-inducing trademark machine-like motorik sound, that he shares with Dinger and Zappi and probably others, combined in Liebezeit with a big bag of global funky-jazz drummer chops.
Indeed, Liebezeit began on the drums as a jazzer, subbed once for Art Blakey when his Jazz Messengers played in Cologne in the early 1960s. He modeled his simple drum set after jazz great Kenny Clarke and admired the drumming of Elvin Jones. But he has some falling out with the free jazz mindset before he joins Can; “there were too many rules in free jazz,” he concludes. Foremost, it appears he burnt out on free jazz’s aversion to repetition and groove. He expresses a preference for the syncopated sounds of flamenco and afro-Cuban jazz music. This reminds me of some remarks in Miles Davis’s autobiography. In the middle of the free jazz craze Miles boasts that he tries to never repeat himself but then admits elsewhere to preferring drummers who keep a strong steady time he can play off. Liebezeit wanted to be Mile’s steady drummer but insisted that his relentless tempos or grooves would lead the way; forcing the tempo, connecting his drumming style to punk and post-punk. Liebezeit’s drumming drives Can’s sound. Like in funk and groove music styles, his drumming is almost always the center of the group’s sound.
I’m no expert on any musicianship, I caution the reader. The most formal music education I got was actually playing drums in my 5th and 6th grade band but quit with a buddy who played the snare drum next to me because our band instructor was, ironically in a story about Krautrock, a complete Nazi figure to us, actually German with a thick accent, and very strict and impatient, which very well could have been because we weren’t very good. Anyway, I’ve never played a drum set and cannot read a musical score. So, like I said, I’m no expert on great drumming. But I’ve always loved beats and rhythms and funky syncopating grooves and it’s hard for me to think of a more original and signature drumming style than Can’s Jaki Liebezeit. He shares the krautrock trademark motorik drum sound with Dinger and Zappi but he brings to it a virtuosic global funky groove traditionalism that is all his own. There are times when he sounds like a machine sample of Clyde Stubblefield 10 or 15 years before this sound would become a staple of hiphop music. Lots of tricky funky beats relentlessly and hypnotically stretched into marathon monster jams. His 23-minute long tour de force in "Chain Reaction" (opening the live set below) displays Liebezeit's classic rock era godhead chops. He was a brilliant drummer. His bandmates were known to describe his drum sound as “half man, half machine.”
The impression I'm left with now is that I've only touched the surface with live Can stuff but, wow, there is some good stuff out there. This is from 1975, so late by most evaluations of Can, but it absolutely cooks with this minimalist banging energy. Not to be missed.
For Liebezeit alone I find nearly all Can’s albums listenable. No doubt they lose some of their signature weirdness when Czukay leaves the band in 1977. And there is definitely a dramatic edge to their sound that is lost without vocalists Malcolm Mooney or Damo Suzuki. All their best albums, solid 'A' albums in my book, Monster Movie (’69), Soundtracks (’70), Tago Mago (’71), Ege Bamyasi (’72), and Future Days (’73), feature one or both of them. But for me the four principles, the Fab Four, jamming together are always a superlative jazz-funk rock instrumental outfit. German psychedelia’s Booker T & The MGs, only in Can's case led by the drummer. Soon Over Babaluma (’74), still arguably an 'A' album, and Landed (’75), Flow Motion (’76), Saw Delight (’77), Out of Reach (’78), and Can (’79), all arguably 'B+' albums, with each including some strong collaborative Can moments. No doubt the vocals pale in comparison with the Mooney and Suzuki albums. And there's more schlager in the later stuff. After Soon Over Babaluma they do sound at times like they are trying hard to sell out but the band always remains tight and good together. Or perhaps up until their 1989 comeback album, Rite Time, when it does sound like they’re all just phoning it in. The collaborative energy in Can all gone.
But it is the Mooney and Suzuki stories that do really take the Can thing to another level in vanguard rock music lore. Neither was a very good singer. They both appeared with Can as though hired hands, although the core quartet talks about the collaborative energy between Mooney and Liebezeit and, as I've alluded, Mooney-Suzuki are a feature of nearly all Can’s best songs: “Yoo Doo Right,” “Mother Sky,” “She Brings the Rain,” “Halleluwah,” “Paperhouse,” “Vitamin C,” “Spoon,” etc. It was as if Can were the Velvets without a lead singer. None of the core quartet were lead singer types, so to fulfill that role they bring in these outsider art guys off the street.
Mooney was artist and graduate student, an American, and a globetrotting counterculture hippie. If ever there was the case for John Ford’s quip about “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” here it was. Mooney’s vocal style was garage rock gruff. He’d obsessively repeat phrases, “Waiting for the Streetcar,” “Yoo Doo Right,” “Outside My Door,” interspersed with yelps and whoops, as sharp rhythmic counterpoints to Liebezeit. The effect was catchy but also edgy and obsessive. In band lore Mooney finally suffers some sort of nervous collapse after performing “The Empress and the Ukraine King” one night, repeating the phrase “Upstairs, downstairs” for hours, long after the rest of the band and crowd had given up and gone home. Shortly thereafter he is counseled to leave Can for his health and he moves back to the states where he went on to become a visual artist and college professor. After those remarkably productive three years with Can, 1968 to 1970, he never plays with the band again until ‘89’s Rite Time. Mooney later says the “Upstairs/downstairs” story was made up but still remarkable how fitting it was to the obsessive repetition in Mooney’s best songs with Can. Mooney was an add on but essential to giving early Can songs a dramatic rock punch that grabbed the listener's attention.
Damo Suzuki was an immigrant from Japan who, after Mooney had left the band, they ran into actually performing on the street, busking, in Munich in 1970. So, again, the lead singer is a hired hand, an immigrant, and sings in English, not German, even though Suzuki was Japanese. In early live performances of the band you can find on youtube it appears as though audience members have no idea what to make of Suzuki. His vocal performances appear to be intense exorcisms, like Mooney, based on a lot of repetition and rhythmic tension and build-up, but are often totally indecipherable beyond the occasional hook phrase chanted repeatedly.
For the longest time I heard the lyrics to “Vitamin C” as “Hey you,” a classic song opening lyric (Swamp Dogg, Pink Floyd, etc), “you’re losing your,” all consistent with a lyric sheet, but then I heard maybe ‘privacy,’ or ‘your sanity,’ anything but “Vitamin C”?! I still can’t hear “Vitamin C”? Or for another example, his crucial "da da das" or “yeah, yeah, yeahs” at the end of “Halleluwah,” where he is according to lyric sheets really singing “Halleluwah”?! No way I hear that but whatever he’s saying the way he says it is indeed exhilaratingly “Halleluwah” stuff. Suzuki’s incantatory chanting make the words, beyond a hook phrase like “Mother Sky” feel less important than the trance-like force of the repetition and Suzuki’s speaking in tongue-like cathartic gesticulations.
The story of Suzuki’s breakup with the band in ’73, after recording Future Days, is almost as strange as the Mooney story. Supposedly he left the band to get married and join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Then the story goes he got very sick, broke up with his wife, and became a successful middle level management guy in some industry. Then he later returned to music by creating Damo Suzuki’s Network, where he’d tour without a band and do collaborative one-off concerts with local musicians around the world. In later interviews he suggests he never felt like a fully integrated member of Can in the ordinary “band family” sense. Be that as it may he sure did collaborate with them to make some great Can albums between 1970 and 1973.
Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki pictured together in the late 1990s or 2000s.
The core band family of Can musicians are Schmidt, Czukay, Karoli, and Liebezeit, but they never sound better than they do when they play with Mooney and/or Suzuki. They’re always predominantly an instrumental proposition, with minimalist lyrics, but their playing and songs are never as intense or dramatically rock as when they play with Mooney and Suzuki.
Two excellent retrospective Can compilations, under Schmidt’s impressive curation, came out in the 2010s, and I’m assuming have a lot to do with Can's growing rock snob legacy.
A 3 hour/3-CD collection of outtakes and live performances known as The Lost Tapes came out in 2012. Foremost, it’s notable, for such a studio-centric band by reputation, how many great live recordings of early Can exist. In their takeoff as a band, 1968 to 1973, Liebezeit is always charging ahead, the band hot on his heels, goading Mooney and Suzuki on. The recordings on TLT are a little crude and rough but remarkably effective for outtakes and make the case for what monsters of experimental rock and psychedelia Can were in those first five years of their existence.
And then there is The Singles a 2017 album compiling 23 Can singles and B-sides originally released between 1969 and 1979, and then the set adds on a 1989 remix of “Hoolah Hoolah.” This is the case for Can as a pop band. It feels a little far-fetched of a claim, Can as a pop band, but still remarkable how many of Can’s singles on this compilation hold up as pop songs. “Spoon” reaches number 6 on the pop charts in Germany in 1972 (and then a semi-popular Amerindie band from Texas name their band after the song in the 1990s). Can even tried disco like everybody else at the time and produced their only chart hit, “I Want More,” in the UK, peaking at 26 in 1976. They’re so into it they then spin that song into a couple more extended play disco funk jams. Ultimately, this audacious collection proves two things: 1) Can were not above the occasional schlager music (“Silent Night," "Cascade Waltz," etc), contrary to Schmidt's original convictions, and 2) Can were remarkably deft at making pop or semi-pop songs (“Turtles Have Short Legs,” “She Brings the Rain,” “I’m So Green,” “Mushroom,” “Moonshake,” etc) for such an anti-schlager experimental rock band. The model might be Abbey Road era Beatles studio experimentation but it’s all Can: improvising German jam band, immigrant Mooney or Suzuki doing their performance art vocal things, and Liebezeit’s proto-worldmusic Motorik funk.
Anyway, Can are now on a very short list of my favorite experimental rock bands of all time. Up there with the Velvets, various Eno collaborations, Captain Beefheart, and Sonic Youth. I think in the same way some critic might dismiss Hawkwind as a grandiose rehash of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” some critic might dismiss Can as a German jazz-funk rehash of the Velvet’s “Sister Ray" or "I Heard Her Call My Name." I recognize the associations, both band's cop to them outright, but I think both Hawkwind and Can transcend those formulations with their records. Anyway, don’t sleep on Can if you like any of the above experimental rock greats. Seminal krautrockers. What I’ve learned most getting into some Can again is that their appeal goes beyond their classic albums. They were a great live band, with way more outtakes of great long experimental stuff out there than I knew. And with more remarkably catchy would-be wannabe pop hits than I realized. It's still true Can peaked when they featured Mooney and Suzuki but they were always a great band and reward greater attention to their expansive catalog of recordings.
Back in the day Xgau compares Can unfavorably with electric Miles Davis. What strikes me today about that comparison is not how much more I like Miles electric albums but what an apt comparison-- long groove heavy psychedelic jams with rock and funk moves-- and then why the either/or? Instead, I imagine what a great double-bill live show would Can and Miles have made circa 1972-1973. Or why not a monster triple bill of Hawkwind opening, Can, and Miles headlining. Three signature variations on classic psychedelic era deep grooves.
