West Germany in the late '60s and most of the '70s was full of turbulence. Imagine reaching the full sentient awareness of adulthood in this period having grown up with the shame of your country's recent past haunting your every thought regardless of yourself having played no part in its actions. It produced anger, reactionary leftist politics, Kommune 1 and wide-scale student demonstrations. It also produced the Red Army Faction and the SPK, while in artistic fields the energy fed the emergence of the New German Cinema and left-field music groups like Faust, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Amon Düül and Can.
Can are the greatest motherhumping 'difficult' underground art-rock combo to ever walk the planet. The reason there hasn’t been much innovation in rock music since Can is because Can did pretty much everything with rock music that can be done, and inspired nearly everything interesting that followed. All those rock groups that have taken the experimental route at some point in their careers since 1977 have merely been doing variations on the Can sense of weirdness, adventure and rhythmic crunch. Of course the fact that this involves so much of the most thrilling music of the past 30 years from Joy Division, The Fall, early PiL, Berlin-era Bowie and Pere Ubu to Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Radiohead and Stereolab is testament to the strength of light emitted from the mighty mothership.
The core musicians of Can were titans and pioneers; multi-limbed rhythm machine Jaki Liebezeit is still officially the funkiest German of all time and the man with the greatest grudge against his snare drum; bassist Holger Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt were both pupils of Karlheinz Stockhausen and appropriately weaved any kind of patterns they damn well liked around Liebezeit's lead pounding brilliance. Michael Karoli played the guitar like a violin and the violin like a guitar to equally scintillating effect.
I put a Can CD on whilst driving and I take the long route home just so my listening experience takes in all 20 minutes of “Bel Air” or all 18 minutes of “Halleluwah”. Can are perfect for motoring around cities alone when your senses are alive to everything hitting you. They're also great through your iPod while walking to the supermarket for a loaf and a couple of pints of milk. They aren't good for parties, unless it's a really, really weird party.
1971's landmark double-album Tago Mago will always bend any head exposed to it; 1973's Future Days album will still sound contemporary in 100 years' time. These are probably Can's finest collections of recordings, made when Japanese vocalist Damo Suzuki completed the 'classic' line-up and sang, whispered and shouted in a mixture of language and gibberish that Sigur Ros haven't quite mastered yet. If you're at all taken by my spiel, then start with those two titles.
Of course there is hyperbole in the words above, but this just comes from being stupidly enthusiastic about something.
Can - "Mushroom" mp3
Was Ist Das?
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