Have rocking cabbages changed modern pop? What is the sound of a cabbage singing, or a broccoli beat? In the German language Kraut means simply cabbage or herb, but in the early 1970s the English speaking world enthusiastically imported the sound of Krautrock. Critics of the day gave this new avant-garde West German genre the ironic name Krautrock and the name stuck, and so did the music, growing to become hugely influential. Did the critics mean to say this was vegetable music, like that of the Austrian Vegetable Orchestra? Not really, because since the end of the First World War Kraut has been a pejorative term in English for a German, supplanting earlier terms and possibly reflecting German fondness for eating sauerkraut, so the Krautrock neologism served both to describe and also mock experimental West German electro pop music of the 1960s and 1970s.
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