Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser Saw Music As A Revolutionary Force

I finished the Dutch edition of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's book De Nieuwe Popmuziek (original German title: Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik). Written in 1969, it gives a pretty accurate description of musical developments since the early 1960s, seen through the eyes of the man who helped so many krautrock bands release their first albums.

Kaiser started his career in the world of music as a journalist. He wrote a number of books on this topic which are all hard to find now, but luckily, I  managed to get hold of a copy.

In his book, Kaiser regarded pop music not just as art or entertainment, but as a revolutionary force that would help create an entirely new society based on anarchist ideas. His biggest hope was Frank Zappa, the most intelligent and politically conscious musician around according to Kaiser.

When reading his work, you get the impression that he almost despised artists that did not sing about relevant social topics or did not make "psychedelic" music, a kind of music he felt you could only understand if you had a revolutionary soul.

For this reason, Kaiser saw musicians like Leonard Cohen or supergroups like Led Zeppelin as marionettes of the record industry, a business that he felt had no other objective than to manipulate and silence "progressive" young people in order to save the political establishment.

Yet, at the same time, Kaiser was pragmatic. He felt that as long as the capitalist society existed, musicians should find a way to make money and sell their work. After all, only then they would be able to spread their ideas.

Not long after publishing Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik, Kaiser put this into practice when he joined forces with the record industry to launch a number of krautrock bands which would otherwise have never had a chance to reach a wider audience. He more or less became the Malcolm McLaren of krautrock: a marketing genius who knew the pulse of his time like no one else.

Now, over 40 years later, all this revolutionary talk about music as a tool to build a new world, seems almost ridiculously naive, but back then it was a serious matter and not even so unrealistic. It's undeniable that artists from the 1960s like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones but also Zappa had an influence on western culture and society. Bands like Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, "discovered" by Kaiser, also had a significant impact on the development of music.

It just didn't go as far as Kaiser had hoped for.

The man himself got intro trouble in the mid-1970s. By then he had introduced the term "cosmic music", developed a friendship with LSD guru Timothy Leary and started taking an ever increasing number of drugs. Eventually he lost touch with reality and stopped paying the musicians who recorded for his label. Klaus Schulze took legal action and this led to the end of Kaiser's business.