Bauhaus slid fully formed from punk rock's womb in late 1978.
Over the course of four hot years, they unintentionally birthed a genre (Goth),
moved on, moved forward, and surged mercurial through the post-punk music scene,
tearing into tense, bass-driven new-wave, T-Rex-esque dark-glam, and swirling,
clattering, orchestral atmospherics, whilst churning it into a grand, velvet,
Rimbaudian hallucination. To pin the band to one genre is nothing but reductive.
Their influences run deep, encompassing everything from dub reggae to
proto-electronic bands like Can and Suicide. As the NME says,
"Bauhaus are to Goth, what Radiohead are to Prog."
It's all building blocks; you see it when they play live. It comes to you in
sudden illuminations! You realize that The Faint, The Killers and Moving Units
got their twisted, sexclub beats from Bauhaus. That the sensual 'disco punk'
darkness The Rapture milk, was unpasteurized dairy to Bauhaus 20 years ago and
second-nature at that. Seeing Bauhaus live brings it all back home. How-without
them-there wouldn't be a Nine Inch Nails or a Jane's Addiction or a Bloc Party,
Franz Ferdinand, AFI, Interpol, Hot Hot Heat. Sui generis.
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