1968 in Art and Culture

A bit of rebellion is not enough: the determination to break radically with existing conditions also influenced developments in music in the late 1960s.

Who remembers the film from that time in which the legendary Uschi Obermaier is spreading a slice of bread for her lover, who is still lying in bed, and asks him if he’d like it with sausage or jam? With sausage and jam, he shouts, we have to finally put an end to these conventions! A little later she asks him what it tastes like. Shit taste, of course, he says, but it’s the break with conventions that’s important.

Mainstream and Protest

Similar observations on enjoyability come to mind when one listens to the music of that era. Wait! Of course, this does not include everything made or released in 1968, but only that which was really brand new and emerged as an expression of the specific attitudes to life in that epoch. So we are not talking here about the wonderful albums of the Beatles or the Beach Boys, or about the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan, who had long before, since the beginning of the 1960s, developed their musical styles from existing trends. Nor are we talking about (and now let us approach the German-language realm) protest singers and singer-songwriters such as Franz Josef Degenhardt, Hannes Wader or Reinhard Mey who, with the Festival that had been taking place at Burg Waldeck since 1964, seemed to be emerging as the musical mouthpiece of the dawning ‘68 generation. However, since they were rooted in the established traditions of the chanson and the political song, they were crushed in the dispute with the will to radical change of this very generation, at least as far as the musical aspect was concerned. “Reinhard, put your guitar away in the corner and discuss,” was the demand at the Burg and, for better or worse, Mey obeyed. Obviously music was not calling the tune here, and as a consequence the Festival was discontinued in 1969.

Freedom was to be boundless, not above the clouds (a reference to Mey’s hit song Über den Wolken, i.e. Above the Clouds. Translator’s note) but here on earth and, first and foremost, in the consciousness of each individual. Anyone delving into the musical upheavals of the late 1960s will inevitably come across the term “psychedelic”: the consciousness-expanding drug, unhinging perception and experience from their familiar brackets, above all LSD, seemed to be the ideal vehicle on the way to this inner freedom, which would enable one to take that which had already been demolished and reassemble it as something quite new, undreamed of – social, musical and drug experiments went hand in hand.

Radical In-fusions

In Germany it was groups like Amon Düül, Embryo, Can, Tangerine Dream or Guru Guru, who blazed new trails from 1967/68. Apart from the ideal vehicle, other influences were also at work. Some of the musicians had studied classical music (as for example the protagonists of Can in the circle around Karl-Heinz Stockhausen), some came from free jazz and brought with them its culture of free improvisation, others adhered to the old Dadaist principle “everyone can do art”, according to which no-one had to able to play an instrument to join in making music, while others were interested in futuristic electronic experimentation and bricolage. From this highly innovative potpourri radical albums emerged which - whether in the selection and use of the instruments, whether in the dissolution of customary song structures – jettisoned everything that constituted the conventional pop song. As already mentioned, much of this seems at first to be quite indigestible when listening to it today. It makes your hair stand on end, it gives you goose bumps, but that’s the way it is, that’s the way it has to be when conventions are broken, when thinking and listening habits are discarded. It has to hurt, the ear is just as sensitive as the taste buds are for sausage and jam and finds it difficult to discover in the chaos the new, simply different order. But which is already there, strolling leisurely through the ruins and has simply not yet decided on a path. Perhaps the clearest example of this is Kraftwerk which, founded in 1968 under the name Organisation and dissed by the audience, later switched over completely to electronic instruments and with their minimalist robot grooves created the most wonderful sounds ever produced mechanically.

Krautrock

Amazing and gratifying in all this remains the fact that it was precisely in this tumultuous, psychedelic phase that the world (in this context this means the English-speaking world) cast an interested, even admiring glance at Germany with regard to rock and pop. No longer were uninspiring copies of their originals produced here – we recall with horror the rock’n’roll of a Peter Kraus or the beat concoctions of the Rattles – no, now we could give (back) impulses ourselves. It was under the apparently unflattering term Krautrock (the krauts, the English slur for the Germans) that this new music not only gained considerable fan communities in England and the USA, but also exerted a lasting influence on musicians and shaped entire styles of music. The radical innovations, for instance, of Can or Tangerine Dream paved the way for bands such as The Fall, Sonic Youth, Stereolab or Radiohead and still influence trends such as hip-hop, ambient or drum’n’bass, not even to mention Kraftwerk, veritable pop stars of world class who may well be regarded as the founding fathers of the entire electronic pop music right up to techno. The term Krautrock is, by the way, only apparently unflattering and uses the slur affectionately: it was coined by the British DJ John Peel – the High Priest of the then pop-radio presenters and a great fan and promoter of the German psychedelicers – inspired by an Amon Düül number with the lovely title Mama Düül und ihre Sauerkrautband spielen auf.

Which takes us back again to food and to Uschi Obermeier (who, by the way, is listed on an early Amon Düül album as a member of the band). Jam and sausage – I’ve never tried it, but who knows, maybe this break in convention will one day be a ground-breaker for a completely undreamed-of sandwich spread. We just shouldn’t allow ourselves to be entirely enslaved by our taste habits.