Member-only story
The first time I heard Wilco’s “Kidsmoke (Spiders)”, it was the most unshielded Wilco song I had heard. More unshielded than anything in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. YHF was simply a melancholic trip. Rusted, undetermined, and eventually painfully beautiful. “Kidsmoke” on the other hand is a band ready to go nude in the mass they had earned in the wake of YHF’s unexpected global infection. An alt-folk band that took a useful advantage of their bleakest moments. “Kidsmoke” was no longer an alt-country song anymore. There is barely even a moment in the country’s history with lyrics about spiders “filling out tax returns”. It must have been coined in a different realm. Wilco had just written a Krautrock opus and bravely stretched it on for eleven minutes in adherence.
But Krautrock’s story is one of an implosion and molestation. I think in the grand scheme of experimental music, the genre stayed a harmless juggernaut with big names riding and shape-shifting it to their self-appeasing benefits of pushing the boundaries. The BBC Four documentary Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany exhibits this mad innocence in a tad speculative manner.
Post-WWII, post-Hitler great depression and a nation plagued with a horrifying history of gas chambers and barbarian slavery found no refuge but to cauterize itself for mentally…
