Electronic Pop Has Roots in Early Werks

Baby boomers have had an unprecedented hold on pop, a three-decade domination, seeing the worlds of subculture, popular music and politics through the eyes of the 1960s. This psychedelia-infatuated, guitar-centric view has been maintained at the expense of anything new. But as sure as time itself, newness rises.

The movement of the moment in popular sound is electronics-based dance music, a genre shunned for decades by this country’s cognoscenti who derided it as shallow and soulless. The roots of electronic pop are in Germany, where the four-man group Kraftwerk rebelled against the unoriginal, often awful “kraut rock” of the ‘70s. Members of the quartet turned for inspiration to the electronic experiments of one of their music school teachers, noted composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. The result was an otherworldly sound of robotic beats and simple, innocent melodies that culminated in 1977’s seminal “Trans-Europe Express” (Capitol). Every genre of pop that utilizes electronics--from hip-hop to techno to ambient electronic--probably owes some part of its heritage to Kraftwerk.

In “Kraftwerk: Man, Machine and Music” (S.A.F., $19.95, 192 pages), Pascal Bussy, the head of the jazz department at Warner Music France, does a thorough, detailed job telling the tale of these unlikely heroes. The book is a journalistic brick in the wall of pop, the story of the triumph of the first wave of short-haired techno-nerds in a world of long-haired rockers. A reprint of a U.K. edition, it is available through Tower Records and Virgin MegaStores.

In “Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House” (Serpent’s Tail, $16.99, 314 pages), British music journalist Matthew Collin spins the tale of one of Kraftwerk’s most significant legacies--the all-night, outlaw dance phenomenon of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s known as acid house and rave culture.

With precision and detail, Collin traces its roots back to British enchantment with U.S. techno, disco and soul, and a generation of young travelers for whom Ibiza, Spain, was the Haight-Ashbury of the ‘80s. In the summer of 1988, some of those travelers attempted to re-create the uplifting Ibiza vibe by putting on all-night outdoor parties fueled by a new feel-good designer drug called Ecstasy and Kraftwerkian beats known as “acid house.” The result was a swell of post-modern, computer-controlled psychedelia that is only now beginning to flood the American mainstream, providing youth culture with an alternative to boomer-molded rock. “Altered State” is a fascinating look at the clubs, people and records that molded a movement.

Timothy Leary defied the kind of my-culture-versus-yours triviality that divides modern America. Though he was a seminal force behind the ‘60s counterculture--promoting open-mindedness as dogma--he evolved and became a promoter for each youth culture that came next, including the cyber-psychedelic rave scene that found an American base in his adopted home of Southern California.

Leary’s prostate cancer was diagnosed in 1995, and “Design for Dying” (HarperEdge, $24, 239 pages) was his final word. He wanted his death to be performance art of sorts (he threatened to have it broadcast live on the Internet, though he never did). His book, written with cyberculture guru R.U. Sirius during Leary’s last months, is a how-to on dying with dignity, humor and optimism for existence beyond the physiological. It includes a collection of raves, rants and philosophies espousing technology and the concept of hyper-reality or life in cyberspace. It also gives several of Leary’s friends, including David Byrne, Ram Dass and Laura Huxley, a chance to weigh in on his life.

Courtney Love has gone from drugs and death to bona fide Hollywood stardom. The mystery of this strange, painful life is unlocked in “Courtney Love: The Real Story” (Simon & Schuster, $25, 253 pages), an authorized biography by Poppy Z. Brite.

Brite traces Love’s prolonged girlhood back to San Francisco. A hippie love child (her parents named her Love Michelle Harrison), Love rebelled and became a punk groupie and jet-setting exotic dancer. When she first saw a band named Nirvana, she wasn’t too impressed with its music or its leader, Kurt Cobain. But she bonded with him over drugs, she said, and eventually they married and had a daughter, Frances Bean.

When Cobain committed suicide in 1994, Love went into a drug-induced tailspin that included an overdose, unproductive love affairs and physical altercations. It seemed she never would ascend the dark clouds of backstage culture. But she did. For starters, according to Brite, she put the drugs in check. Then she proceeded to woo Hollywood with her performance in Milos Forman’s “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” Love her or hate her, Love at 32 looks like she’s here to stay.

Kevin Powell was the bad boy during the first season of MTV’s contrived, voyeuristic docu-drama series “The Real World.” He since has become a name-brand music and pop culture journalist, turning out copy for Vibe (where he was a senior writer), Rolling Stone and Essence. “Keepin’ It Real: Post-MTV Reflections on Race, Sex, and Politics” (One World/Ballantine Books, $24, 237 pages) feels like a literary version of “The Real World,” correspondence for a new generation of memoir readers.

The collection is frank, spanning Powell’s poor childhood in Jersey City, N.J., his years of rebellion as a fatherless teenager and his relationships with women as a young adult. He has something to say about almost everything, from integration to ebonics to monogamy. Though he sometimes rambles nostalgic, he occasionally waxes wise: “What bothers me most is that I see far too many people--regardless of race or sex or sexual orientation or class or religion--stuck in a time warp, their lives dictated mostly by myths and half-truths which, sooner rather than later, stymie some or most life possibilities. It is my hope that some of us want to be freer. . . .”

“Mr. Sunset: The Jeff Hakman Story,” by Phil Jaratt (General Publishing Group, $35, 192 pages), is a history of modern surfing as told through the life of a legend. Jeff Hakman’s father pushed him into his first wave when he was 8 years old. At 14, he entered the surfing boom of the early ‘60s head first, riding giant Sunset Beach in Hawaii. At 17, he won the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational Surfing Championships at Sunset Beach--a teenager taking a veteran’s event. By the late ‘60s, he was surfing hard and partying harder, living on pot and LSD and charging the biggest waves he could find off Maui, his adopted home. In 1969, he was trying his luck at smuggling hashish to make extra money. When he was caught with pounds of the stuff in the back of a truck, it made headlines: “Surf champion held on drug charges.” The charges were dropped on a technicality, but drugs, especially heroin, still haunted him.

Still, the early ‘70s became his heyday as he ushered in short surfboards and the professional era of world surfing. In the early ‘80s, fatherhood convinced him to clean up his act, and he did, becoming a marketing executive with Quiksilver, the world’s largest surfing-related company. “Mr. Sunset” is a wild, almost cinematic ride, complete with coffee-table photos of breathtaking surf.