Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of a Revolutionary New Music - Hardcover

"[A] well-written and enjoyable look at that very fascinating pop music that emerged from Germany from the mid-'60s onward... An excellent contextualization of German Rock."
--Yahoo! Music

"A massive answered prayer... Well-researched, well-written, intensely detailed, and oftentimes gripping."
--Kirkus Reviews

"David Stubbs deftly situates legends like Can, Faust, Neu! and Kraftwerk in their historical context--the politics and culture of post-WWII Germany. But more crucially, the rollicking energy of his prose and reeling majesty of his imagery convey everything about this music that transcends time and place."
--Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania and Rip It Up and Start Again

A sweeping history of the men and women who transformed postwar Germany—and created a musical genre that revolutionized rock and roll and gave birth to hip-hop.

West Germany after World War II was a country in shock: estranged from its recent history, and adrift from the rest of Europe. But this orphaned landscape proved fertile ground for a generation of musicians who, from the 1960s onwards, would develop the strange and beautiful sounds that became known as Krautrock.

Eschewing the easy pleasures of rock and roll and the more substantive seductions of blues and jazz, they took their inspiration from elsewhere: the mysticism of the East; the fractured classicism of Stockhausen; the grinding repetition of industry; the dense forests of the Rhineland; the endless winding of Autobahns.

Faust, Neu!, Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Amon Düül II, Can, Kraftwerk—the influence of these groups’ music on Western popular music is incalculable. They were key to the development of movements ranging from post-punk to electronica and hip-hop and have directly inspired artists as diverse as David Bowie, Talking Heads, and LCD Soundsystem.

Future Days is the brilliantly reported, deeply researched story of the groups that created Krautrock, and a social and cultural history of the Germany that challenged, inspired, and repelled them.