1. do you think that serious talk about music intimidates people?- it threatens several ideological ideas about music - listening as well as producing - being a specifically unintellectual or anti-intellectual practice. some of those ideologies have somee good reasons going for them in the sense that music can be a claim to a place of your own to which the legitimate cultural practices have no access. i can understand the function of this kind of anti-intellectualism. nevertheless, i have witnessed a million times how people can't stop believing in their idea of unmediated creativity and other nonsense. it becomes too painful for them to drop this belief or reformulate it as strategy, therefore they have to belive in it. but there are other types of intimidation by serious talk about music. i regularly feel intimidated by the music talk of young male specialists. but maybe i feel intimidated by them because i used to be like them. you are always hate your own mistakes more than others. plus, older critics are always bored when they recognize something they've experienced before, and they become aggressive when things differ from the way they have experienced them in their days. the present can't win.
2. how accessible is your criticism?
- i am afraid not very much and it's getting worse the older i get. i refuse to talk about new music as if it were the first album i ever heard. i also refuse to stop listening to new music. so i tend to fall into the trap where i talk to young and new listeners about young and new products with the attitude and typical vocabulary of an old man - comparisons and references to records that are out-of-print and books that are boring to read for the very audience that enjoys new music - although i also write a lot about old people's music. there are cases where the conditions of communication with my readers are much better.
3. what's music criticism like in germany these days?
- it's like everywhere else i guess. extremely specialized discourse by specialized fans who know a lot about their field of expertise but not much more. brutal ignorance on the side of the establishment media. that is probably the big difference to the anglophonic world: there is more established music journalism and there is a university-background which does not exist at all in germany.
4. as a german music critic active in america, what forms of cultural intervention are possible within the context of rock criticism?
- i wouldn't call myself "active in america" . at least not in the field of music. most of my activities in the states were fine art-related. even when i talked on music, it was published in artforum or on panels organized by artforum or artists and art critics. i was teaching in pasadena at, again, an art / graphic-design institution. i am doing the same thing in germany. i think it is very difficult to intervene as a german in the anglophonic countries in the field of popular music - at least that is what my german publisher experiences whenever he tries to sell my books on the british or us market - because pop music is considered the domain of english-language writers. i am not talking about wagner or whatever the national stereotype makes me seem more qualified for, but then i have never really tried to make myself known to the american audience.
5. does your approach change when you engage in criticism outside of your home country?
- yes, definitely. since i have been active in austria, spain, less often in belgium, switzerland and denmark, i am familiar with the imperative to drop all insider-talk and all references to certain agreements and past discussions that make it so comfortable and also more elegant to address an audience that you know and that knows you. the other main problem is that i have to write and speak in english (outside germany, switzerland and austria) - and since i am not so good at that, i'll never have the same sense of commanding the language.
6. "spex" is a cool name. what does it mean?
- back in 1980 when the magazine was founded - two years before i started writing for it, five years before i became an editor, and eight years before i became a publisher - the editors and publishers were fans of the british punk band, x-ray-spex, with polly styrene and lora logic. that's it.
7. what was / is the agenda of spex?
- the agenda was: highly personalized writing and new music - first new wave, industrial, new german music, and later more hardcore and soul; since the 90s: hip hop, so called alternative music, techno and post-techno - politically leftist perspectives, and a lot of extra-musical subjects, mainly from the art world. the agenda is: to publish the leading german magazine on music culture, on certain musical and artistic extremisms, and also dissenting views on mainstream subjects, with now nearly 50% of the magazine dedicated to non-musical cultural and political subjects, including more theoretical and academic debates from the field of cultural studies, as well as the criticism in that field. now and then "spex" has been highly determined by personal taste and the ideas of its editors and publishers. so there always been forms of "extreme music" that we hated and never included, and vice versa, boring mainstream music that we loved and featured.
8. in a recent interview with mayo thompson, you mentioned the liason between rock and art. where would this liason lead us?
- sometimes art can provide institutional support for projects that have no backing in either the mainstream or alternative music industry. sometimes you can escape the respective limits of one of those two worlds by flirting with the other or cheating on it by sleeping with the other. of course there is not principally an advantage in the combination or liaison of the two, but in history quite often there have been strategic advantages, like for examle the fact, that i can make a living as an instructor at art academies only on the grounds of being a music writer - but i would never be accepted by a music institution. germany is a country with a very retarded academic scene when it comes to the study of popular culture, but within art institutions it's a highly developed field. it's similar to the historic fact that all british musicians of the 60s were art students.
9. do you think that artists and musicians end up mutually idealizing each other?
- in general? david bowie is idealizing balthus and damien hirst. i think lou reed and john cale never understood andy warhol's art - maybe it's the same vice versa. joseph beuys recorded a 7" with one of the worst german bands. jospeh kosuth designed a john cale sleeve - i have no idea what the two have in common. mike kelly, of course, knows more about music than most musicians or critics, and he collaborated quite productively with sonic youth who obviously know a lot about art - neither of them are idealizing each other. all those metal bands who are into dali or fantasy kitsch don't know what they are talking about, but when they give descriptions of the art they like to their young friends who do their album covers, they produce sometimes the most brilliant paintings. i think we have all kinds of possible interpretations and projections between artists and musicians, just as we have between everyone else, but we sometimes have interesting milieus that are composed of both sides.
10. who would represent your ideal rock star? (male and female)
- the age of rock stars is over, isn't it? at certain moments in history this position was held by - in no particular order - john lennon, roger mcguinn, nick drake, robert wyatt, julie driscoll, yoko ono, green gartside, boy george, cecil taylor, ornette coleman, miles davis, mayo thompson, john cale, nico, nicolette, alison statton, peter hein, harry rag, lora logic, gina birch, mark beer, bob dylan, detlef diedrichsen, dudu pukwana, peter brötzmann, jim o'rourke, david grubbs, mike ink, brian ferry, david bowie, ninjaman, cedric myton, lee perry, prince far I, mark stewart, krs one, chuck d, curtis mayfield, marvin gaye, diana ross, goldie, david thomas, madonna, tupac shakur, erykah badu, janet jackson, lizzy mercier descloux, kid creole, coati mundi, bootsy collins, kim fowley, todd rundgren, george clinton, thelonious monk, johnny winter, jerry garcia, derek baily, van dyke parks, chuck dukowski, greg ginn, tony williams and the notorious b.i.g. - to name just a small number of people who come to my mind in five minutes.
11. can you tell us a little bit about your books freiheit macht arm - life after rock'n'roll 1990-93 and political correctness?
- the title of the first one is a pun: literally it means, "freedom creates poverty", but it also refers to the infamous words at the entrance of a concentration camp, "work sets you free" (arbeit macht frei). it's the reversal of that one. it's about the end of the idea of freedom that rock'n'roll was about, which came from the cold war and the american lifestyle. this freedom was the freedom of the market that we have today which literally has created a lot of poverty around the world and formed the dominant ideology of today - from "wired" to boris yeltsin. my point in that book (written in '92 and published in '93) is that hip hop, as a music of disappointment and hopelessness, provides the master narrative of our current situation - with a lot of counter narratives of course on its side. the scope of the essays in that book is very wide - from a tour diary (on the raod with ice-t), to theoretical essays on subversion and the new german right and its consequences for sub- and countercultures. the second book, "politische korrekturen", does not translate "political correctness" but "political corrections". it's about the import of the pc-debate in europe and parallel cultural war maneuvers. my point is there never was any perosn in the world who definded him or herself as politically correct, but that the label "pc" was an attempt to unify and subsequently demonize all kinds of different micropolitical activities. this becomes especially interesting in germany where everything from anti-racist resistance to the still very underdeveloped germans of contemporary feminism is quite successfully and routinely dismissed as "pc". my final question in that book is: if such a thing as pc - the way the right wing describes it: a powerful leftist cultural political agenda - would really have a chance to exist in this world, how would it like to be?
12. how do you conceive of cultural resistance in rock today, particularly after punk and hip hop?
- i have no idea. is there such a thing as cultural resistance by itself? at least there wouldn't be if it weren't connected to any broader type of resistance. of course i don't believe in the power of the nice opinion and the good will and don't even think it is a task of any art to resist, but more modestly at best to articulate what hasn't been articulated - and that something hasn't been articualted and something else cannot be articulated today is political, but not in the narrow sense of censorship by the mainstream or assimilation and subsequent devaluation by the culture industry, but in a much broader sense. nor do i believe on the other hand in the culturally pessimistic reading of adorno/horkheimer's rather dated culture industry essay or debord's analysis of the "spectacle" - as two versions of totalizing the cultural field from a pessimistic high-art point of view. to me hip hop is not a part or an episode or a subgenre of rock, but its antithesis: anti-utopian, pragmatist and realist, in the best and in the worst sense of those qualities. i don't see hip hop exclusively as a form of resistance, but rather as an artistic type of articulation that adds material to what should be considered and looked at before one starts to conceive of any type of cultural or other form of resistance.
13. have any musical movements been particularly significant to you? why?
- i was a little bit too young to become a hippie and little bit too old to become a punk, thus i've ben influenced by both. i spent some months in ny between '80 and '83, and saw bambaataa at the roxy and hung out at the negril when they had breakdance shows, and at one point even danced at the paradise garage. so hip hop and club culture have been impressive and significant to me, but i wasn't so involved. in the late 80s i started spinning records , mainly raggamuffin and electronic reggae, some hip hop and proto-jungle, until 1993. i missed techno and many other movements of the 90s. i was bored by grunge. you see that the reasons i offer are mainly biographical. music became meaningful because i happened to have some sort of priviliged access (geographically, socially, mentally, or whatever). growing up in germany you never consider any music natural or part of your roots - because german "roots" are too horrible to have any investment in them - but everything in the world is equally close or far. it all depends on what happens to you.
14. how do you read the present dj / remix trend?
- it's been going on for almost twenty years. green gartside called it deconstructive as early as 1982. it's the dominant mode of musical production after the song. the remix is the successor of the song and it follows different rules of signification. and it influences musical pratices far beyond dance music.
15. what are your thoughts on the revival of krautrock in america?
- it's amusing. 95% of what is reissued is the worst music i happened to have to listen to when i was between fourteen and nineteen. the music that is worth listening to again never really needed a revival, it was always known: can, faust, kraftwerk, amon düül 2 and so on have been mentioned by everyone since the punk days. the rest, especially the mystic wing like tangerine dream, ash ra temple and the likes, are plain horrible with the exception of early popol vuh. at "other music" in ny you'll even find german rock bands of that time that sound worse than, let's say, norwegian bands. but everyone should check out xhol caravan, especially when they were still called soul caravan.
16. you've written essays on "the swing to the right" in post-unification germany. is ethno-nationalism still a big issue in relation to music/cultural formation in germany?
- it's a complicated discursive phenomenon and it still plays a big role in defining post-unification normality. there are much stricter asylum laws, easy deportations and of course an ideological background for that. in music you'll find here and there a techno or post-techno electronic musician who tells you that his or her music is now free from african-american elements or british elements, it's now really german. even good musicians and nice people say things like that from time to time.
17. what interests you the most in the current music scene in germany as a listener and / or critic?
- a) minimal techno - the sound of cologne: mike ink, gas, j burger, the modernist, etc;
b) stella - a band from hamburg that sound like the most brilliant moments of 1980-rough-trade-sound;
c) minimal techno from berlin: maurizio, basic channel and so on.
18. are you optimistic or pessimistic about now?
- neither, nor.
19. any zeitgeist comments?
- no.
20. what's the last sublime music moment you experienced?
- terre thaemitz's cd, means to an end; the blood&fire reissue of king tubby meets morwell unlimited; cecil taylor's berlin cd, always a pleasure; janet jackson's recent activities; music from porter ricks on a tape i often listened to.
/ originally published around 1998 and taken from an us-fanzine titled music.
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