Steely Dan?

Bebop spawned the first hipsters, not rock music.

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Sex isn't dirty, sex isn't a crime. It's a loving act between two or more consenting adults.

-Hank Kingsley

Velvet Underground?

Or, and this is about as musically listenable as Lenny Bruce is ha-ha funny:




Chronologically a bit later but musically considerably more enjoyable:



Bowie's fascination with and appropriation of NEU's sound starting around Heroes' has made the band transitively influential. Also, they get points for blowing their record company advance for NEU! 2 on expensive synths and various instruments and thus running out of money for proper studio time to record enough tracks for a full-LP. So they just took the tapes for Side A and re-recorded the tracks at home slowed down and what not to make up the missing content for Side B on NEU! 2.

As far as the krauts go, I always liked Can more than Neu!, which felt like raw materials for later stuff or something you were supposed to say you liked more than you truly did. They were a one-trick pony to me: like, the groove is tight, okay, now what? Can had a better balance of conventional songwriting, abstract stuff, and balls-out experimental weirdness (like the whole side of Tago Mago that descends into a homeless Japanese man screaming "AHHH, I'M GONNA KILL YOU!!!!" over a super-sped-up ur-primitive drum machine). "Vitamin C" and "Moonshake" still hold up years after I lost my tolerance for doing stupid shit like listening to Metal Machine Music or Trout Mask Replica all the way through. Jaki Liebezeit's in the discussion for best ever.

"Spiders (Kidsmoke)" off A Ghost Is Born is about the most baldfaced Neu! ripoff there's ever been.

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Tweedy prolly heard NEU! at O'Rourke's while off his head on opiates; a possible excuse for going Carlos Mencia on Neu vs Tweedy's usual mining of Paul McCartney's discography for musical inspiration.

He fine-tuned his krautrock larceny when he spun "Art of Almost" out of Soon Over Babaluma.

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re: Can, checked in on their Tago-Mago just now, yeah, I like their beats and rhythm, but then the jam-bandish guitar noodling comes in and the distracting psych-rock lyrics and, not what i like i guess

But then among my favorite tracks is something more minimal, or mnml, than Neu at their most sparse:

https://youtu.be/RGME6jCwqw0

-- listening to Hawtin's pure drum-machine track on computer speakers/headphones over the internet doesn't quite resonate, i'd think. vs hawtin playing it live on 808's or 303's or whatever to 50,000 people on a giant system at demf in 2000. or to 500 people on an equally loud rig at the Packard Plant or City Club parties.

Daft Punk playing live at the old Drop Bass Network outdoor festival back in '96. Bangalter working out on a 909? 303 acid squelchs and trills in there. And the 808, I think the 808's the backbone of the 'four on the floor' techno/house sound :



At one point in the above video, someone offers up a line of something (yay? K?) to Thomas Bangalter mid-performance and he expertly rails it without missing a beat.

wonder if they play that (this: https://youtu.be/mgWJwxl-wG4 ) live much; could have a whole kraut-rock segment in their show. i'd prolly enjoy that.

btw, listened to Wilco's new Schmilco? record recently. Threw it on in the car with My Morning Crack-Kit's At Dawn interspersed. Not bad, enjoyable listen on a Sunday drive. I think what Some Guy said is spot-on: it's not bad; it's not great; it's WILCO

the At Dawn demos CD (Jim James doing all the tracks solo acoustic, for the most part) that Darla Records included in when you bought At Dawn vinyl back in 2001 or whenever it came out, worth tracking down. I think I posted it here before. I'd repost em but I'm getting killed on my NFL bets (why'd I put the Lions in a triple road-dog parlay?f ) so I'm shiftless at the moment.

Only reason I'd heard of MMJ when I did and then caught them at Schuba's that year (where they appeared to be high as fuck on stage but played a great show) is they weirdly ended up on Darla Records; and Darla pimped the heck out of At Dawn to their mail order customers; which I must've been going through some sort of uber-emo-fag period to have been ordering stuff from Darla Records.

does captain beefheart count as a hipster band? i'll never forget when autechre played/mixed some records and dropped captain beefheart in there and it amused john peel to no end (RIP you glorious brit you)

john peel loved taking pics in front of his wall-o-vinyl over the years



btw i've always assumed that my aphex twin fandom has transcended hipsterdom. the fandom dates back to 1994 and i don't really remember the contemporary "hipster" existing til sometime in the 2000s.

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remember Hipster's in downtown Naperville? the word couldn't be farther from what it means now than what it meant in the mid 90's.