Rockpedia

In short

German musicians with no interest in the blues, building rock again from the rhythm up.

The scene

Everything else on this map descends from American blues. This does not. A generation of West German musicians decided that the twelve-bar and the backbeat were somebody else's inheritance, and started instead from repetition: Neu!'s motorik, a straight, unaccented pulse that goes on for as long as the record does, and Can's habit of improvising for hours and editing the result into songs. Conny Plank engineered a great deal of it. The British music press named the whole thing after a joke, and the joke stuck.