on Neu! imitators...

they can be entertaining enough, but at the end of the day, it's old Neu!s innit? 

whereas the original...

So how come alt-Neu! still sounds neu-er than nu-Neu?

The paradox of modernism - the Breakthrough, suspended for all time thanks to the 20th Century miracle of recording, recreates the original moment of emergence and insurgence each time you listen (or look, or read). Is somehow eternally new, like fresh-picked fruit flash-frozen.

Flaubert's Madame Bovary startled me awake, when I read it for the first time last year -  even though all its innovations have been long assimilated and rendered second-nature commonplaces in subsequent fiction.

(I also feel that the groups reactivating - if not quite reenacting  -  the breakthroughs made by other earliers, have evaded all the hard work that went into actually breaking through into the new / Neu!. Their undoubted youthful energy masks an idleness (an Idles-ness, even). They have started with the outcome of the process, rather than instigating an equivalent new-generative process themselves.