[sdiy] We are the Mummies (was: Freak at Home)

[jbv]

> Kraftwerk didn't invent electronic music. But they did make it funk like no
> one else did.
>
> >And on the other hand, we had that boring & condes-
> >cending elite / avant-garde who used to think in the 60's
> >and 70's that they were "inventing the music of the future".
>
> And we still do. The *technology* that was spun-off from the work of
> various avant-garde composers certainly did have an influence, and we
> wouldn't have most of the toys we have today without it.
>

Well, I'm afraid we'd better stop this discussion now,
as we seem to be trapped in the same old boring confusions :
dull techno and boring pop songs being qualified as electronic
music, technology being confused with music...

Nothing personal here, but for some years I'm getting rather
sick of this kind of old-fashioned "positivism" that inhabits
music & technology... Telling the truth it's the main reason
why I unsubscribed to the KW mailing list 5 years ago.

Let me tell you my own opinion : with or without Kraftwerk,
Pierre Henry, Stockhausen and the likes, music technology
would be more or less the same as it is today.
AFAIK, except perhaps for MIDI, very few research and
discoveries have been made especially for music. Transistors
and ICs and DSPs have been developped for other purposes
(mostly military), and once they went outside military labs,
music was only 1 of the many domains that did benefit of them.
Furthermore, all of those pseudo visionnary and pionnering
artists were only able to produce what technology allowed
them to produce, at certain places and at certain times.

I must confess that one of the only thing I still like about KW
is their lyrics. After all, may be are they just "sung technological
manuals" for the masses, wrapped in sweet (but traditional) pop
songs... Funny to think that they had to put concepts into WORDS
(the oldest human technology) to deliver them (or at least to try to
deliver them) to the masses...
I remember an interview of Ralf in 1976 in which he did his best
to explain that the main difference between "Pop Corn" and
"Radio-activity" was that there was a concept behind "Radio-
activity" while there was none behind "pop-corn"...
What a joke...

JB