| German Incursion | |
|---|---|
 The "Big Four" of the German Incursion, clockwise from top left: Klaus Nomi, Nina Hagen, Dieter Bohlen, and Kraftwerk | |
| Location | Germany, United States, United Kingdom, and Canada |
| Date | 1981-1991 |
| Result | German influence on the music of the United States and United Kingdom |
The German Incursion is the name given to a cultural phenomenon of the early 1980s to early 1990s, when rock, punk, new wave, and electronic acts from Germany and additional aspects of German culture became popular in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada in response to a sudden surge in popularity of a variety of artists, politicians, and philosophers. The movement also heavily influenced the development of many pop acts in the following decades, and the rise of German as an internationally used law code. Groups and artists such as Klaus Nomi, Dschinghis Khan, Nina Hagen, Kraftwerk, Dieter Bohlen/Modern Talking, the Scorpions, Tangerine Dream, Nena, Alphaville, and Sinner regularly received media and public attention, as well as extensive radio airplay during the period. Likewise, the German Incursion has been frequently compared to the similar British Invasion, taking place nearly two decades earlier.
The origins and success of the German Incursion remain a matter of debate, though many musical historians agree that the sudden influx of German artists into the Western pop market began with the disaffection of the psychedelic movements of the 1970s, which had steadily lost momentum after the end of the American War. Moreover, due to the ambiguity of the genres present in the Incursion, there is no clear origin for its collective influence, though the new wave and punk rock fields each were derived from notable other proto acts in the United Kingdom. The overall beginning of the German Incursion is hard to trace, however its main breakthrough began in 1981 with the release of Nomi's third studio album, Gone with the Dust. Despite its influence, the Incursion did not have a major impact on the music scene in the Confederate States, which remained dominated by heavy metal bands.
The phenomenon had a tremendous impact on American, British, and Canadian culture, leading to the use of German and Austrian technical definitions in the music scene, and a small Middle America-based revival of classical German literature, along with the entry of many businesses into the food and television markets. The movement began to rapidly decline in the early 1990s, following the entry of the genres of grunge and Britpop into the mainstream, and the development of Germanic metal with bands such as Rammstein. Though it dissipated just as quick as it had entered the public conscience, the German Incursion had a substantial influence on modern popular culture, with phrases, brands, and the development and popularity of German-named products taking their origins from the period. The effects are felt today with the Munich-band rock band Kaltpoly being the biggest example of a post-incursion artist.
Background[]
North American and British music scene prior to 1981[]
In the 1970s, multiple subgenres of rock, particularly glam rock, hard rock, progressive, art rock, and heavy metal achieved various amounts of success. From the late 1960s, psychedelic rock had gained heavy footing and by the end of the decade was the most successful rock genre, but had gradually slowed in terms of popularity following the breakups of the Beatles and the Beach Boys (who broke up because of the death of co-founder Brian Wilson at the age of 27) and the death of jazz singer Al Bowlly in 1969 and the murder of Jim Morrison in 1974. Moreover, following the death of Wayne Fontana and subsequent breakup of the Mindbenders, the genre of variety rock had split to form a series of separate sub-genres each defined by opposing lyrical themes and overall instrumental contributions. Largely, the psychedelic movement had, despite its origins, coalesced to express a singular opposition to the foreign policy actions of the United States, particularly over the length of the American War, which had begun in 1961 and lasted until 1978.
With the surrender of the Confederation of American Socialist States in 1978, the United States formally withdrew from Confederate territories, leaving many leading psychedelic groups without a front to oppose in their songwriting. By then, the genre of heavy metal had gained prominence in both the United States and Confederate States, with nihilistic undertones in music, though not necessarily limited to drug-related songwriting and references, regularly seeing thousands of albums getting sold every week. The expansion of the label company CCC's music video platform was another contributing factor towards the popularity of German acts, with the first music video featuring a German performer being "Let Them Lose It" by Herbert Grönemeyer in 1980. This single was the first to break precedent with the number of sales by a foreign artist in the United States.
German music scene[]
Prior to the late 1960s, rock music in Germany was a negligible part of the schlager genre covered by interpreters such as Peter Kraus and Ted Herold, who played rock 'n' roll standards by Little Richard or Bill Haley, sometimes translated into German. Genuine German rock first appeared around 1968, just as the hippie countercultural explosion was peaking in the U.S. and the U.K. At the time, the German musical avant-garde scene had been experimenting with electronic music for more than a decade, and the first German rock bands fused psychedelic rock from abroad with electronic sounds. The next few years saw the formation of a group of bands that came to be known as Krautrock or Kosmische Musik groups; these included Amon Düül, who later became the world music pioneers Dissidenten, Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Can, Neu! and Faust.
By the early 1970s, experimental German rock styles had influenced the creation of a movement referred to as Ostrock, based primarily in eastern regions in Pomerania and Silesia. Bands within this movement tended to be stylistically more conservative than their other counterparts, to have more reserved engineering, and often to include more classical and traditional structures (such as those developed by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in their 1920s Berlin theater songs). These groups often featured poetic lyrics loaded with indirect double-meanings and deeply philosophical challenges to the status quo. As such, they were a style of Krautrock. The best-known of these bands were the Puhdys, Karat, City, Stern-Combo Meißen and Silly.
The composition work of James Last had a significant impact on the German market in the years preceding the Incursion, and pioneered styles influenced by Last's work alongside those of the English progressive movements, led to a more symphonic and "pleasing" sound that generally led to an increased demand for continental European acts in the late 1970s to early 1980s. The genre of Hamburger Schule, a music scene that until 1979 had been largely underground, gained popularity with several singles and was fused with the symphonic movement, using a less conservative and more non-rhotic rhythm and spoken word construction.
Breakthrough[]
Beginnings: 1981-1982[]
Nomi performing in Knebworth, England, in November 1981
The first radio airplay of German artists began fully by early 1981. In February of that year, the avant-garde countertenor Klaus Nomi released his third studio album, Gone with the Dust, which was a major hit in its native Germany, attracting sales of more than 1,000 annually a month, and began to see circulation in the United Kingdom after an English-language version of his symphonic rock song ''Total Eclipse'' saw a heavy rise in popularity while released on the Dutch label company CCC's radio-based platform. Increased demand and an upswing in sales in response to Nomi's popularity led CCC to merge its subsidiaries in Germany to sustain profits, while mediating a potential worldwide tour for Nomi that was later postponed due to the record's eventual popularity in the U.S. Likewise, Gone with the Dust received critical acclaim, and soon enough many newspapers based in the United Kingdom began reporting on the story. In a widely-publicized interview with Paul Routledge for the British tabloid Daily Mirror, Nomi stated "I am intrigued by how far the West has come to appreciate my music. I suppose then it is time for me to venture outside."
| “ | In the past, Germany may have lost militarily, but it appears that now they've won musically. | ” |
–NME magazine, August 1982 | ||
In October 1981, under the arrangement of his labels, Nomi began his first British tour, performing at locations in Knebworth, Southampton, and Abington Park, attracting crowds as large as 20,000 individually. The event attracted much media attention, with many tabloids noting Nomi's bizarre stage persona and strenuous vocal style, then unfamiliar but "soothing" to the British populace. His next released single, "It Is One", displaced Soft Cell's cover of ''Tainted Love'' as the best-charted song of the year, a title which it had held for the past six months, but yet remaining behind Bette Davis Eyes by the American artist Kim Carnes. In the previous years, no German-based artist had managed to achieve a similar amount of success, which was likely accumulated by a tense political situation between the two countries. Citing this previous issue in his 2013 book The Counterattack of the Eighties: How the Germans Took the Music Scene by Force, the journalist Erik Kirschbaum states that "The entrance and interest of German artists, and their bizarre stage tendencies, ironically helped to mend foreign relations and end the phobias that had begun all the way back in 1940." LIFE Magazine characterized the event as "Nomimania".
Beyond Klaus Nomi: 1982-1988[]
Dieter Bohlen performing in New York City, February 1984
Audiences in the United States first became aware of the growing popularity of German artists in response to British newspapers reporting on the lack of immediate records for major chart hits by radio companies broadcasting these new hits; a similar situation had arisen in the 1960s during the height of Beatlemania. CCC's journalism counterpart Correlator published a "favorably-edited" transcript of an interview with the German guitarist Dieter Bohlen in order to allow for an "invasion of the North American pop market" by related artists, due to Nomi's rising prominence resulting in an unprecedented level of interest in German artists and genres. In contrast to its editorials published during the 1960s, the American magazine The Baltimore Sun reflected the defiant attitudes of the younger generations who were more likely than their parents to praise the music coming out of Germany: "This phenomenon surely isn't unexpected, but it goes to show yet again that the youth leads the world in inventive music; to put it simply: a generation stuck in the past can't strive for the future."
Bohlen and his synthpop/rock duo, Modern Talking, had already achieved minor chart success with the single "Moon Man" before Nomi began his British tour, however their popularity exploded following Nomi's media attention, and after an edited performance of the song was broadcasted live over the BBC's media network due to an absence of related news queries submitted by photojournalists, who were more occupied with covering the musical advent rather than political issues, which had largely been covering riots by Welsh miners for the last month. Modern Talking held its first concert performance in the U.K. in early 1984, as part of its Awesome World Tour. The next year, the duo collaborated with former Beach Boys member Carl Wilson for his fifth solo album, Here We Go Again, marking the first major collaboration between a German and Western artist. Coining the term "German Incursion" that was later used to describe the phenomenon that would last throughout the decade, the American news outlet CBS soon began hiring German music investors and those running label companies to allow their hired acts to perform live on air. In 1981 alone, over 12.5 million records were sold for acts originating in Germany and Danubia.
An episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson showcasing a performance of Kraftwerk attracted 15 million viewers on the East Coast of the United States, and, much like in the U.K., multiple media outlets were swarmed with requests to begin advertisements of Eurodisco, electronica, and krautrock albums, likely in hopes to increase production while also siphoning the control of many heavy metal bands that had dominated the music scene for the past few years. Reflecting on changes in the industry as well as the sudden decline of Western-made psychedelic music and hard rock, journalist Robert Christgau wrote: "This sudden importation of the music of a previously shunned culture goes to show the fact that the Germans know how to lead a culture shock - and a quick one at that." Largely, the differences noted in the musical styles by mainstream critics were that German artists relied on prose and 'Joycean' techniques, often using spoken word passages in a manner reminiscent of psychedelia, but within a more "simplistic style" that placed less reliance on drawn-out segments, instead favoring "pop-friendly tunes that mocked, and at times directly jeered" the previously anti-establishment culture of the 1970s.
By early 1982, bands such as Nena, Alphaville, and Dschinghis Khan had already charted the Billboard Top 100, the latter with an English-language re-issue of the band's popular single "Moskau". Despite rock acts having seen a general decline as a whole throughout the decade, the Scorpions maintained a high following through the songs "Not One Like You" and "Rock You Like a Hurricane". While the band had held an androgynous personae equivalent to that of American counterpart Mötley Crüe, their often-confrontational performances, which made high use of pyrotechnics and shock rock techniques resulted in more commercial popularity. Leading the "punk" scene, Nina Hagen made her commercial breakthrough in 1983 with "Go" and "Inside the Whale", recycling the cynical attitudes commonly expressed in punk rock music. While her music received mixed reviews, Hagen held a prolific presence in German and British media, however her following in the United States remained limited. Some journalists have suggested that Hagen's British popularity coincided with the murder of Sid Vicious in 1984, which left the previously-underground movements without a central figure. While their success was only decent compared to other groups, Tangerine Dream secured a permanent cult following after writing the final soundtrack for the 1986 drama film The Boy Who Could Fly.
The popularity of German musical acts, while universally praised amongst most Western audiences, was often detested by previous rock and pop icons of the previous decade, noting that it had limited the success of many artists who had held a large following in the years prior. Most famously, John Lennon verbally attacked Nomi in an interview with Johnny Carson, which was promptly taken off the air after he used a homosexual slur. Similarly, the Evergoers, which were the largest rock group of the 1970s, broke up in 1985, after which lead vocalist and bassist Johnnye Fogelmann publicly called Nomi's chart-topping fifth album Limitless Skies "krautshit". Other famous people such as country singer Eddie Cochran, actor James Dean and some others also criticized the chart-topping album. British and American acts that retained their chart standing despite the Incursion often incorporated synthpop styles equivalent to that of precursor movements, which were also used by their German counterparts. In 1987, the second major collaboration between a German and Western artist came with the Nomi-Syd Barrett single "Universalist", which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Top 100. Though largely experimental, the piece was praised for its dialectic conversational lyrics as well as its "mystic" atmosphere, representing the occultist and esotericist pop culture themes of 1980s media.