Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk:
"The Beach Boys of Dusseldorf"

Before there was Old School...

Before there was Old School hip hop, before Afrika Bambaataa ever sampled a first note from Kraftwerk, there was Middle Europe.

Fast rewind to the 1930s Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

Much like the antebellum South, that Mitteleuropa culture was cut off and vanished with the wind, seemingly for good.

War does that to cultures.

Kraftwerk's Lasting Impact

Eulogies to bygone ways of life have been known to attract the Nobel Prize in Literature. Think Yasunari Kawabata. Think Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Never mind that other German youths in the 70s were partying their heads off, smoking pot, and listening to the Beatles, trying to forget their own German origins.

It takes a different kind of courage to embrace Middle Europe, 1930s style, as a source of inspiration.