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.

Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik

I mentioned him before: Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. For some he was the guru of krautrock, for others a crook. Whatever, without him cosmic music would not have been so cosmic.

Before he got known as a record label boss and producer, Kaiser worked as a journalist. At the end of the 1960s he published a range of books about rock music. They're all out of print and it's unlikely they will ever be reprinted, if the rumours about Kaiser's mental state are true.

You can imagine I just felt lucky when I bumped into a Dutch translation of the originally German Das Buch der neuen Pop-Musik (De nieuwe popmuziek in Dutch).

I don't believe it has ever been translated to English. Kaiser was German but a regular contributor to the Dutch Aloha magazine.

See the pic of my copy - which clearly has remained unread since its publication in 1970.