Krautrock and multiculturalism

 As I struggled to write my column, do my homework and peel myself away from Facebook stalking the other day, I wandered off into the world of bittorrent.com as a means of escaping the drudgery of the deteriorating mind.

What resulted was an introduction to the genre of Krautrock.

Krautrock is an unusual and overlooked period of rock history during which many German bands, such as Kraftwerk and Neu!, fused elements of classical music structure, jazz, progressive rock and electronic experimentation to form a new style of rock. This genre is considered by some to be responsible for the flourishing of industrial rock and electronic music.

In fact, the genre was so influential that David Bowie named Krautrock band La Dusseldorf’s music “the soundtrack of the 80s” and integrated much of the sound into his dance music hit “Fashion.”

My introduction to a foreign, 30-year-old blip on the radar says a lot for what globalization has done for art.

First of all, it has made art more international. No longer is the standard pop-cultural trend a progression from the United States to the United Kingdom and Australia to the rest of the non-English-speaking Western world and finally to the deep recesses of the Third World, where the most well-known American is Elvis Presley.

Instead, we have entered an age where the groundwork for a global thoroughfare has been set across the world. The globalized art world stands in a new context with the globalized worlds of economy, communications and research.

This places art in a very interesting position as 2009 unfolds.

With the public interest of “change,” certainly affected by Barack Obama’s victorious presidential campaign, it is everyone’s task to put culture out there and to bring culture in. We have already seen that happening around us as more and more bands sprawl out from the cable line every day.

Multicultural art is successfully streaming into American tastes from every direction of the globe, from the growing popularity of foreign films to the appeal of international style icons such as M.I.A.

Thus, the pool of diversity in and through art seems to be broadening as more and more world citizens dive in with every passing day. At the center seems to lie the possibility of global artistic rebirth.

Like the ambient/industrial fusion of Krautrock and the availability of such music today, we are digging in every direction to globalize the human significance of art.