Josh tipped me off to this bizarre review of the Senor Coconut Latinized Kraftwerk album. Bizarre in that it rests on a premise that Kraftwerk were not only “empty” and “cheesy”, which is a limited but not ridiculous viewpoint, but also on the idea that nobody’s listened to them or taken them seriously since the turn of the 80s. Except of course those catch-all villains, the ‘hipsters’. Given that Kraftwerk have a good claim for being the most influential band since the Beatles for their “electronics + rhythm = music” equation, this is…odd. (I always took the Ramones a lot less seriously than Kraftwerk!)
It brings home the extent to which the last fifteen years have seen music, and music listening, schism. To a bulk of listeners who went along with the dance ‘revolution’, Kraftwerk seem to have Godlike status. To those people who doggedly stuck with rock, they’re some forgotten novelty act. In Britain, where the two tendencies have stayed more convergent than in most places, pieces like the Splendid review would be unwritable: the world of the American indie rocker continues to seem like curious and inhostpitable terrain.