My “Against the Fascist State” Playlist

Sometime amidst the news deluge in January, I created a new Skype playlist that I called “Against the Fascist State.” I had some sort of notion that this playlist would be something to sink into in order to take back my own headspace. It would somehow be an artistic force pushing back against the incredibly unsettling and soul-crushing news out of my home state of Minnesota. The video footage of masked federal police brazenly disarming and murdering American citizens who were peacefully protesting a federal hostile occupation was, as they say, living very much rent-free in my head. Countering such a stimulus is not an easy task for a playlist. One might think I would’ve reached for Rage Against the Machine or something more classically anti-fascist for my playlist, but I just allowed myself to be guided by instinct.

An afternoon melted away, and I found myself with a playlist heavily featuring songs that form a historical nexus in the 1970s where the Krautrock movement, Brian Eno’s creation of ambient music, and then David Bowie’s Berlin era collided in West Berlin and generated a sound that would flow into the 1980’s and shape that period for me.

But why did that music seem so right for my “Against the Fascist State” playlist? I mused on it here and there over the past few months, very much informed by having read Low by Hugo Wilcken last year. My evolving thoughts on this question seemed like they might make an interesting essay for the blog. I hope you find it interesting!

You can’t know me very long before learning that I’m a pretty big fan of David Bowie and that Low is my favorite album. I promise I’ll try my best to refrain from this essay turning into a David Bowie hagiography. As mentioned in the intro, my “Against the Fascist State” playlist heavily features music from Bowie's Berlin period, particularly Low and Heroes. It also antecedent music from Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and the broader world of German electronic music in the 1970s. It also features later descendants of this sound: New Order and Depeche Mode. There is a musical evolutionary logic to this flow of music, but why was I so drawn to it amidst a period of news stories that seemed like a dystopian sci-fi coming to life before my eyes?

At first, I assumed there was a significant degree of musical nostalgia at work. Much of the sound that emerged from those artists eventually found its way into the dark and dreamlike films and television shows of my childhood that I watched again and again in school and at my friends’ houses. The Berlin sound can be heard throughout the 1980s and continues to shape contemporary works attempting to evoke that decade, such as Stranger Things or Bladerunner 2049. The synthesizers, sequencers, and atmospheric textures have become part of our collective cultural memory. And I think there is something to that nostalgia, something that is comforting, but there was more to it than that.

I have a tendency to place the music I hear in the song’s historical context when I’m reflecting on it, and I think the historical moment that produced this music might hold some answers as to why I reached out for this Berlin sound music this January.

The Germany that gave rise to Kraftwerk and many of its krautrock contemporaries was a society wrestling with unsettling questions about identity, culture, and the future. World War II had understandably discredited many inherited German socio-cultural narratives. The nation remained politically divided by occupying forces and culturally broken. A nuclearized Cold War cast a looming shadow over everyday life, and Germans growing up under occupation were without traditional forms of agency. For many German artists, the challenge was not simply creating new music. The challenge was determining what could be built after old cultural foundations were utterly corrupted by the preceding generation and then violently collapsed into rubble.

These artists took on this challenge in about as bold a way as I could imagine. Rather than looking backward, they opted to reject their organic cultural inheritance and instead looked forward. Bands such as Kraftwerk, Neu!, and others sought to create a distinctly modern sound. They embraced electronics, repetition, minimalism, and experimentation. They rejected many of the assumptions that shaped Anglo-American rock music that was then dominating the radio waves. Instead of drawing heavily from blues traditions, they explored machine rhythms, synthetic sounds, and long atmospheric passages.

What emerged was not merely a new style of music. It was an attempt to imagine a new cultural landscape. Listening to this music over the past few months, what strikes me most is how little of the music sounds angry. Given the circumstances that produced it, one might expect a healthy amount of rage or violent rebellion. Coming from another corner of Europe, punk would soon provide exactly that response, yet the German electronic tradition followed a different path. When I watch videos of Kraftwerk discussing their music, the sincerity and earnest artistic hunger still moves me today.

The famous motorik rhythm associated with krautrock captures this determination to rebuild and move forward perfectly. The steady, driving beat creates a sense of movement. It sounds like travel. It sounds like motion through an unfamiliar landscape. It does not dwell on what has been lost. It focuses on what lies ahead. I suspect that is one reason the music resonates with me today. (For one example, check out Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.”)

Like many Americans today, I look around and see vital institutions under strain or breaking. Assumptions about fundamental decency and long held national values are being brutally undermined daily. Public trust is evaporating as glaring public corruption has become a kind of performance art. At the same time as all this political chaos, technological change is reshaping society faster than many of our social and political structures can adapt. Across a wide range of issues, there is a growing sense that old assumptions and old cultural anchors no longer provide the guardrails they once did.

The details obviously differ from those of 1970s Berlin, but the feeling is familiar.

There is a temptation during periods of socio-cultural upheaval like this to embrace one of two extremes. The first is to defend existing institutions and practices regardless of their shortcomings and to dream a dream of reinstating them exactly as they were before the Fall. The second is to conclude that everything is irredeemably broken and should be torn down entirely—faith never again to be placed in one’s own community—burn it all down.

Neither response strikes me as particularly satisfying in the long term, and I admit that some of that is almost certainly my particular temperament and my historically-grounded perspective on life. What I find compelling about the artists who created this music is that they pursued a third option. They neither ignored the failures of the past nor surrendered to nihilism. Instead, they experimented. They built. They searched for new forms.

Perhaps this is one reason David Bowie's Berlin period continues to speak so powerfully across generations. Bowie encountered these German musical ideas at precisely the moment he was attempting to reinvent himself. He did not simply imitate what Kraftwerk and others were doing. Instead, he translated those influences into something intensely human.

The resulting albums are filled with melancholy and uncertainty, but they are not hopeless. They acknowledge fragmentation and alienation while holding fast to the possibility of meaning. The music feels futuristic, yet it is deeply concerned with human questions of identity, purpose, and connection. I think that combination gives the albums much of their enduring power.

That creative impulse remains visible in the music itself. Beneath the electronic textures and mechanical precision lies a surprising sense of longing. Kraftwerk's music often feels wistful. Eno's ambient works create spaces for contemplation. Bowie's Berlin trilogy reflects both Kraftwerk and Eno but are also filled with hopeful yearning. The emotional atmosphere cultivated by this scene in Berlin feels like standing at the edge of an uncertain future and then stepping boldly into it.

I think many people sense that significant change is underway today, even if they disagree about its causes or consequences. The future appears increasingly difficult to predict. In such moments, it seems tempting to me to become either nostalgic or cynical. I think the music on my “Against the Fascist State” playlist represents the third choice of defiantly moving forward. The artists who created this music did not know what the future would bring. They did not possess a blueprint for cultural renewal. What they did possess was the willingness to experiment, create, and imagine in the face of socio-cultural and political upheaval. Half a century later, I conclude that this socio-cultural posture is why I instinctively reached out for this music as I felt the world turn upside down.