Kraftwerk More Influential Than the Beatles

if you are talking about developing a style that reverberated musically maybe there is a point. they innovated electronic machine music.
but influence on music not even close.
when you look at the music scene with the bobby vee's and fabian's prepackaged corporate pop
and then see how it dramatically changed after the beatles where every kid picked up a guitar and wanted to do the same it is not even close.
the beatles were good at hybridding things but they changed the landscape musically and culturally and kraftwerk or electronica never did.

 

Who? never heard of either them until I saw this thread.

 

I'll put this way:

Ask ANY, I mean, ANY musician/band about The Beatles. Immediatly they'd say something about the fab four. Some songs, stories, memories, etc

Ask any musician/band about Kraftwerk. Many of them would answer: Who the hell are them?

 

Kraftwerk is and has been influential, but to say they were on par with the Beatles is a bit of a stretch.

 

The pertinent question is who might have more impact over today's music scene. Diversity of thought is never a bad thing, and this forum is far from representative of the majority of popular thought.

 

Wow, that's really cool.

 

How many EDM, hip-hop, pop etc. artists are actually big fans of Kraftwerk though?

 

Different eras, plus there is something like twice as many people on Earth now as there was when The Beatles played Ed Sullivan. So there are now fewer people alive who remember The Beatles first-hand and many more who are around today with Kraftwerk still being active. If The Beatles had hypothetically survived to the present day like The Stones have, maybe things would be different. I could just as easily say that Kraftwerk doesn't now and never will yield the kind of massive socio-cultural impact that The Beatles did in their era. A third of all televisions in one nation will never tune in to see Kraftwerk on a variety show, although I'm not knocking Kraftwerk by any means.

 

I think you mean ask any band you know. This post was on the last page :

"Autobahn" was on the radio a couple of weeks ago while I was in the car with my 19 year old daughter.

She reeled off a list of various favourite bands of hers (all current) who she said it reminded her of.

Definitely influential, no doubt about that.

 

Roger Waters was more influential than Kraftwerk. Just ask him.

 

Because the Beatles music has been around for so long, it is easy to take their all-pervasive influence for granted. In the 60s, it seems that there was no genre of music that wasn't influenced in some fashion by the Beatles. Soul? Country? Jazz? Yep, yep and yep. There influence is so vast that it would be truly difficult to envision a musical landscape had they never been part of the equation. They came at a time when there wasn't nearly as many sub-genres of music, nor were there as many options for listening to music. It was radio or buying records. To a much smaller degree, there was television, with shows like American Bandstand and the Ed Sullivan Show, but the main way by far that people listened to music was radio and records. No YouTube, no streaming, no downloading, and no MTV. The fewer options to listen to music meant that the Beatles music was being absorbed by a much higher percentage of the population. And thanks to their vast popularity, their music was also heard in cover versions of their songs by a dizzying array of artists in several genres. Is it even possible to imagine a world where none of this ever happened? And due to this pervasive influence, I would say it is far more likely than not that you could count the members of Kraftwerk themselves as being influenced on some level by the Beatles. This would then render this comparison a moot point as no Beatles might also mean no Kraftwerk, so one would have to take all of the Kraftwerk-influenced artists and say that they are influenced by The Beatles, if only on a DNA-level.

One other thing to consider is the fact that Kraftwerk wasn't particularly a popular band, even in their heyday. Their records didn't sell in massive numbers and their obviously was never anything approaching a "Kraftwerk-mania". To suggest that now they have a greater influence than the Beatles would mean that over the past 40 years they have found an incredible surge in popularity. I understand that they were pioneers in electronic music, but to say that EVERY artist who now does electronic music is "influenced" by Kraftwerk is like saying that everyone who ever used an electric guitar is "influenced" by Les Paul.

 

Pete Townsend, although not my favorite musician, has to be given some credit for his work on the synthesizer. Sequencing the synthesizer.

Brian Eno praises him in: A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary: Brian Eno: 9780571179954: Amazon.com: Books

 

its a junk thread people! Nothin' to see here!

 

Willful ignorance?

 

Influenced by Kraftwerk:

 

That tongue doesn't look too healthy...

 

This convinced me: New Order is the most influential band ever.

 

What about Joy Division?

 

The Velvet Underground didn't sell in huge numbers but have been massively influential.

 

Please!

 

No, I mean ANY band. Known and unknown. Every of them have heard about The Beatles, while many (if not most) haven't even heard the name "Kraftwerk". Let alone know a single song by them

 

I'm going to try this, and put The Shaggs in the centre! Betcha I can make it look the same...

Kraftwerk is cool. Second most influential? Phhhht.

 

Really??? Who came first? Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder (writer & producer of "I Feel Love') who was also producing synthesizer music from the mid 70s?...