Kraftwerk

This is my wife G’s most hated band. Or so she thinks. I’m sure I could get her to lunge for the stereo’s power switch faster if I put on some Severed Heads or some Foetus, but it’s this band that’s always first off her tongue when the subject of bad music comes up. Not surprising, I suppose, as Kraftwerk does tend to evoke a lot of strong responses. For I feel as strongly towards the band as she does away from it. She once asked me why I thought Kraftwerk was so important, and I found I couldn’t answer. I mumbled something about the embrace of technology and the peculiar warmth of their glowing circuits, but she was unconvinced.

Whether you love them or hate them, at this point in popular music history, you have to admit that they are one of the most influential bands of the last couple of decades. Formed in the early '70s in Germany (Kraftwerk loosely translates to “power station”), Kraftwerk was the first band to really embrace machines for what they were, not for what they could be. Lots of groups used synthesizers, but they mostly used them to imitate existing instruments or for the pure novelty of their sounds. Kraftwerk was really the first band to embrace those hard electronic tones as beautiful in and of themselves. While others fretted about the place of machines in human society and celebrated that vague indefinable “human” element that separates us from our creations, Kraftwerk exalted the machine as the ideal being, and worked to strip all that pesky and unpredictable humanness from their sound. The result is a stunning body of work that was decades ahead of its time, ultimately influencing everything from disco to hip-hop to each and every artist that fits under the wide umbrella of electronica.

Kraftwerk’s first and most improbable hit was the 22-minute long Autobahn, an ode to that famous shrine of speed. When I was in high school and eating everything electronic I could get my hands on, I heard about this legendary track, but had never actually had the opportunity to listen to it. Being financially poor in a rural part of Michigan meant that my opportunities to hear the cutting edge of music were severely limited. I only had a certain amount of money to spend on records ($10 a month, to be precise), and the range of available material was pretty narrow, so I had to choose my purchases wisely. Kraftwerk sounded interesting from what little I had read about them, but there were several albums available and I didn’t know which one to get and it was just too much of a risk at that point. And then Jeff came to town.

Jeff was a guest dance teacher from the Ozone Dance Theater and one of the strangest guest dance teachers we ever had (and believe me, we had quite a parade of weirdoes coming out to take up residence in our neck of the north woods). His area of expertise fell under the general rubric of modern dance, but if you were to get more specific, you’d have to call his style sort of a post-hippy neo-stoner aesthetic. He wore army fatigues as dance clothes, choreographed pieces using the I Ching, and his favorite method of warming up the class was something he called “Warm Space”, in which you did whatever it was that you felt was the best thing to warm you up in the morning, man. Since I took a three-hour class with him that started at 8:15 in the morning, Warm Space quickly devolved into Sleep Space, with dancers crashed out on the floor for a half-an-hour until he finally got us all up to do some exercises. And his exercises would often involve jumping up and down for half-an-hour or spinning in circles until you thought you were going to puke. Jeff’s weirdness was legendary around campus and stories would filter back about how somebody had seen him walking backwards down the street in the middle of the night or had come across him standing on his head in the middle of the woods.

A couple of weeks after he arrived, he held auditions for his piece for the spring dance concert – each teacher having to choreograph and stage at least one piece per trimester. In his typical style, he told the assembled dancers that there was no set format for this audition. Instead of showing us a series of combinations and then watching us perform them to decide who to use, which was how the typical dance audition was structured, he was just going to put some music on and we were supposed to dance in whatever way we wanted – let fair Terpsichore have her way with us while he watched. He wanted to get a sense of how we moved naturally, or so he said – but since he ended up picking everybody who showed up to be in his piece anyway, he may have just wanted to DJ for us for an hour.

He went over to the stereo, turned it all the way up (he used to really cheese off my mom, who was the resident ballet teacher, when he did this – much to my delight), and put on a record. There was the slam of a car door, and then a slow revving to life of an engine, which receded as the car pulled out of the driveway, honking. Then a moment of silence. And from the silence, a mechanized voice intoning, reverently, “Autobahn”. This was it! I was finally going to hear Kraftwerk! I rolled my shoulders and shook out my legs, anticipating the dance. The slow pulse of synthesizers began. I let my body float as though I were in water, each movement slowed and exaggerated in the fluid. Even though the music was clearly and celebratorily electronic, there was still an undeniable warmth to it, a kind of innocence, a naïve optimism. This was a brave new world and yes, all was right, I did love Big Brother. It was sonic Soma. And each time the chorus would wind up and the song sounded like it was ending, I mourned that it was over, but each time, it rose again to fill the room with its automatic cheerfulness. I danced and swirled and reveled in the beautiful washes of color and non-deceptively simple melodies for twenty minutes, mesmerized and transported, swirling and spinning and rolling across the floor with 30 other dancers in physical communion, a giant swirling organism in which each member, each ant, danced to his or her own different drummer, now twisting together with two or three others, now spiraling out on their own orbit, always contributing to the whole. It was physical jazz and I didn’t ever want it to stop. Eventually and inevitably, the song did come to an end after filling an entire album side. Jeff filled up the rest hour with other wonderful music, magical modern music I had only dreamed of. It was the first time I heard Orchestral Manouevers in the Dark (OMD) as well. And it was Jeff that first introduced me to what very well may be the greatest album ever recorded, Brian Eno and David Byrne’s landmark collaboration, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Looking back, that afternoon audition was one of the highlights of my high school career – a moment in which I was young and strong and free and happy. A moment in which I knew I had found a kindred musical spirit and in which I soared and skipped and danced to my long-sought music, music that spoke to me and for me, music that touched some inexplicable deep pre-verbal spot in my soul. Music I was meant to hear. As I spun around that room, I knew I was home.