The Sound of Yourself Listening: Faust and the Politics of the Unpolitical

Abstract

This article discusses Krautrock's perhaps most iconic formation, the German band Faust, and its immensely successful first four albums of the early 1970s. The article first focuses on the ways in which the band's avant-garde self-image continues to cover up the ways in which their creative output was tied to social and political questions that faced Germany in the wake of the generational upheaval of the late 1960s. Supported, in part, by original interviews with three of Faust's founding members, this article then broadly re-examines the band's subtle social attentiveness that is often buried beneath musical experimentations and extra-musical reflections. In the end, one can therefore conclude that Faust's until now overlooked politics of the unpolitical constituted a musical project aimed to question the status quo and Germany's inability to confront its past adequately.