Nobody in West Germany ever called it Krautrock. The name was a British music-press coinage that hardened into a half-mocking label, and the musicians it described disliked it for decades. What they had in common was generational rather than stylistic: a postwar generation, roughly born between the late 1930s and 1950 and raised in postwar West Germany, who arrived at music-making with the explicit feeling that the Anglo-American rock vocabulary they had grown up importing was already exhausted.

There was also a more uncomfortable problem. The previous German popular music tradition — Schlager, marches, anything that came before 1945 — was either compromised by association with the Nazi period or simply rejected by a generation that wanted no part of its parents' culture. The result was a scene with no usable native folk tradition to lean on, and no interest in copying the British blues-revival bands — the Rolling Stones and their kind — who were digging the old blues back up. What was left was the studio, the synthesizer, and the avant-garde music school: Karlheinz Stockhausen, the towering figure of postwar contemporary music, taught the new-music courses in Cologne through the sixties, and his students there included Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt, who in 1968 founded Can.

Can's approach was the closest to jazz: long improvised takes edited down in post-production by Czukay, often with vocals overdubbed later by a non-musician they found by accident — first Malcolm Mooney, then Damo Suzuki, the latter spotted on a Munich street corner. Tago Mago (1971) and Ege Bamyasi (1972) sound, on first listen, like rock records; on second listen, like rock records in which the guitar and the drums have agreed to ignore each other for forty minutes.

Neu!, founded in Düsseldorf in 1971 by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, both of whom had passed through Kraftwerk, did something blunter. Dinger had a drumming idea — a steady, unornamented four-on-the-floor pulse, the hi-hat flicking open between beats for a metallic "tss". He first called it the lange Gerade, the "long straight"; the British press later christened it Motorik (a term that came to cover the regular krautrock pulse generally, including the grooves of Can's drummer Jaki Liebezeit), and Dinger himself, years afterward, renamed it the Apache beat. Hallogallo (1972), the ten-minute opening track of their debut, did almost nothing for ten minutes except continue: the same pulse at the same speed, never accelerating, never resolving. That refusal to do anything was the rebellion against Anglo-American rock. It is one of the most influential things anyone in the band ever recorded. Kraftwerk, meanwhile, after a few looser, more improvisatory early albums, gradually shed its acoustic instruments — the guitar, the flute, the violin — and committed to electronics. Autobahn (1974) still has flute and violin on the title track, but its twenty-two minutes already sketched the sound of synth-pop years before the genre had a name.

The list of British and American records that would not exist without Krautrock is long enough to be tedious. But the influence travelled as technique, not as a roll call of names. Take Brian Eno, who collaborated on Bowie's Low and Heroes (1977) — most deeply on Heroes. What he transplanted was specific: he has publicly called Neu!'s beat, Klaus Dinger's drumming above all, one of the great beats of the seventies, and he laid that motorik drive — never accelerating, never resolving — straight under Bowie's rhythm tracks. Play Heroes and the imprint is still plain. The same transfer repeated through other hands. Joy Division's drummer Stephen Morris cited Neu! as the reason he played the way he did. London's Stereolab built a thirty-year career on a single repeated chord they took from the Velvet Underground and Neu!. The Fall, PiL, and most of the British post-punk generation that followed pointed to Can as the reason they had stopped taking the Stooges as their model.

In America the inheritance came slower but proved unavoidable. The groundwork was laid as early as 1982, when Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock built itself on Krautrock — the melody of Trans-Europe Express (1977) and the rhythm of another Kraftwerk track, Numbers (1981), replayed by hand rather than sampled, since the technology to sample didn't yet exist. By the 1990s the loop-based dance underground in Detroit and Chicago had absorbed Kraftwerk wholesale; techno's founders in Detroit have said on record that their primary inspiration was Kraftwerk's records, made across the ocean in Düsseldorf. Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation (1988) owes its long-form structural patience to Krautrock more than to any U.S. precedent. New York's LCD Soundsystem scored hits with songs that were little more than a four-on-the-floor loop plus a guitar. They, and most of the bands the post-rock and indie-electronic press took seriously between 1995 and 2010, were, functionally, doing Krautrock with better gear.

There is one part of the Krautrock story that the British and American inheritors mostly left behind: the political and philosophical seriousness. Faust's communal Wümme studio in northern Germany, the Cologne avant-garde lineage that produced Can, the cosmische scene around Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream — all were embedded in a particular post-1968 West German conversation about how to make culture that wasn't either the parents' or the Americans'. That context is not portable. The Motorik beat is.

What got exported, and is now baked into any contemporary indie or electronic record, is the technique: long-form loops, the synthesizer treated as a primary instrument rather than a color, the drumkit relieved of its rock-and-roll obligation to swing or to throw in fills. The half-century since Hallogallo has been a slow, ongoing demonstration of what happens when one generation decides the previous toolkit was wrong and bothers to build a new one. That once-new toolkit is the default now.