New Book

I'm not really sure of everything you are saying. You obviously know more about the arts in Germany around the Krautrock time than I do, and it's great that you are sharing that knowledge with me. You seemed to first say that it is a shame that the other arts at that time don't get as much recognition as the music, and yet here you rightly point out that these film-makers are studied worldwide. I think you are right that "popular" music is not as recognised academically is it could be, although I think there are degree courses out there where all sorts of rock and pop will be analysed. It has often been the case that populist art forms are not taken as seriously as others, and it is interesting that film has managed to spark academic interest in ways that rock/pop, television, computer games and comic books have not, despite there being some excellent and thoughtful works in all of these areas. I guess you get more academic attention for Citizen Kane than you would for Avengers Assemble.

However, I do think that music, certainly in Prog and related genres, has created a lot of music that is not considered to be "throwaway". And I have had many amazing moments listening to music, I have never been to Filmore, and have never used recreational drugs. 

Thanks! That's really nice praise, it makes me feel all glowy inside

I have created this in Microsoft Publisher, and the internal links all stay perfectly intact as you add things, which is great. At the moment I am considering it to be "done", (unless I get alerted of glaring errors that really need to be fixed), but it would be possible to expand it if I wanted. It would certainly be tempting, as time goes by, to insert reviews of newer albums, for example. However, I do feel like it is big enough, and there is a danger that if I keep tinkering and adding I will never really finish, and it will just keep growing, and growing. I shall mull this over.

I am also not sure about indices (or indexes, I don't know which is correct) - you are the second person who has mentioned this. My "excuse" for not doing so is that as a PDF you can easily use the search function. My actual reason is more mundane - laziness. The publisher document has got so big that it actually takes about a minute to insert a link now. However, I'll think about it, and thanks for the suggestion.

My next "big" project like this is to go mainstream. I have compiled a list of the 1000 greatest albums of all time (like this book, by combining existing lists). I reckon it will take me about 5 years in total and will be an amazing voyage of discovery. Time I plan to do it as a blog rather than a book.

Thanks again.

I wonder if you might like my book "The Musical Instruments of Progressive Rock: An Illustrated Guide"

Thank you, you are so kind. I spent a lot of time trying to make it look nice, and is the first time I have done something like that on this scale. 

Thanks for taking the time to write all this, I found it very interesting. I know generalisations can be difficult, but are often necessary.  

I suspect that one of the reasons that the music of Krautrock is more well known than other arts aspects that may be been connected, is that music, especially instrumental music, does not suffer from the same language barrier that some other things do.  

Thanks for taking a look

As much as I like the Flower Kings and as good as some of their albums were I'm not really sure they had any albums that stood out in a way that it would make it easy to choose one over the other. In other words it would be sort of a like domino thing(if you put this one in then you have to include this one, etc). That said I guess I personally would probably chose space revolver but it's by no means the only solid album in their discography.

Yes it's true there were some I liked more than others, including in the extras that I included to round things out a bit. In those extra ones I didn't really want to do too much to expand on bands already included, although that kind of flies in the face of the fact that I included 90125, Genesis and Invisible touch, and some King Crimson....  oh I don't know I guess I had to draw a line somewhere.

The question of what should be included in something like this is tricky. I am not at all surprised that people will call me on this. As I was formatting it up after all the writing I was wondering, for example, if I should have put an album by The Flower Kings in. 

Anyway, thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it.