Just finished FUTURE DAYS: KRAUTROCK AND THE BUILDING OF MODERN GERMANY by David Stubbs. David Stubbs was a music journalist during the golden age of writers (1986-1991?) at the British music newspaper MELODY MAKER. Him, Simon Reynolds, Chris Roberts and the rest were producing some of the smartest and most entertaining writing about anything in that period. FUTURE DAYS is a book about that thing we point at when we say “Krautrock,” which is a word that should never have been used and should never survive to the present day. I feel like that truth that the word just stuck and became a practical label isn’t reason enough, but the fact remains that there really isn’t another word that covers the entire movement. A movement that lasted from 1968 to, what, 1975? “Elektronische” doesn’t necessarily cover everything, and neither does “kosmische.”

The new German music of that period was a work of alternate history. Many of the practitioners were engaged in a process of imagining a new German music that Nazism, World War Two and the Anglo-American occupation (and consequent cultural contamination) never happened to. It was, as much as anything, an act of science fiction.

The book is a sustained and intelligent investigation into the causes and philosophies of the music, as well as the sort of creative history and sonic consideration that the best music journalists bring to bear. And David Stubbs was always a great music journalist. FUTURE DAYS makes it brilliantly clear that some of that music still points at a tomorrow that will float there forever, just a little further upriver.

FUTURE DAYS: KRAUTROCK AND THE BUILDING OF MODERN GERMANY, David Stubbs (UK) (US)