Kraftwerk

After this, I became a huge Kraftwerk fan. I turned Jeff on to what little cool stuff I had gathered on my own and he turned me on to a number of bands that still rank among my favorites. And chief among these was Kraftwerk. I couldn’t explain why the simplistic electronic automaton music made me so happy, but it did. It was the beginning of the fruitful marriage of my two favorite musical trends – the textures and tones of pure electronic music and the thrilling energy and driving beat of rock music. The '80s had officially begun.

Jeff ended up choreographing a sprawling, random multimedia dance to the first two tracks from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, one from OMD (Bunker Soldiers), and the glorious title track from Kraftwerk’s 1975 album, Radioactivity. Like much of Kraftwerk’s material, there was a cozy, almost nostalgic warmth to the track. Amidst all the fiercely electronic, impossibly dry, soulless sounds, there was a warm, rich bed of vocals – treated, mechanical vocals, but vocals nonetheless. By being filtered and processed, the ghostly mechanized chorus sounds like it’s coming out of some old radio in the forties, glossing the whole track with a sheen of nostalgia for a future that’s no longer possible (the Brazilians have a word for that, sodade) – the warm, glowing, clean, happy, mechanized society of leisure that hung like a carrot in front of the post-war boom.

There were some thirty dancers in his piece, all dressed in black with white tennis shoes, and each piece of music had a different feel and was choreographed using different random elements or patterns. The Kraftwerk movement of his dance cycle consisted of half the dancers jumping back and forth from foot to foot in unison while the other half walked across the stage as slowly and smoothly as they possibly could. During the dance, there were slides projected around the stage and friends who saw it described it as pleasantly nonsensical, but for me, it was a triumph just to hear this glorious music pumped out through the giant amplification system of Corson Auditorium.

After that semester ended, I went back home (across the street) for summer vacation. My new Academy friends gone for the summer, I tried to reacquaint myself with my old friends who lived in the area, and with whom I had lost touch with while sequestered in the dorm. Lenore and Mel and I went out to spend the day at a favorite beach on Lake Michigan (we lived within easy walking distance of two lakes, Duck and Green (or Wabakeness and Wabakenetta in the native tongue), but drove the hour or so to Lake Michigan for special occasions). The day was hot and the water was cold and the company was good. We soon fell back into our easy comfort around each other, but there was an edge that hadn’t been there before. I had been away, and had had experiences that they didn’t have. I no longer saw them on a day-to-day basis, so we weren’t connected like we used to be. We were still friends, and good ones at that, but something had shifted. Also, we had all recently gone through puberty and so our awareness of each other had changed drastically. Mel and Lenore were still a good friends, but now they had breasts.

After swimming, we were lying on a low dune, sunning ourselves, and listening to the only passably interesting radio station around. They were playing the standard pop fare of the day ((Let’s Get) Physical and Endless Love, for example) when my ear was caught by a different sound. A cheerful tune full of bubbling synthesizers and gently rigid electronic beats started. The keyboards whistled and chirped agreeably, and then the vocals started: “I’m the operator with my pocket calculator”. I knew right away it must be Kraftwerk. Amazed that such an agreeable sound had cracked the radio, I listened happily as the song unfolded. Pocket Calculator was the first (and, as it turned out, only) single from the recently released Computer World album, one that I hadn’t had the chance to hear yet, but which fit the Kraftwerk mold perfectly, and I smiled in recognition. There was no pretense to being anything but purely synthetic and the lyrics sounded like they were written by an early artificial intelligence program, but there was a great warmth to it. After it was over, Mel and Lenore burst into laughter, and quickly tried to outdo each other in insulting the song. I grinned and kept quiet. Things were different. The times they were a changin’ and the future was mine.