Kraftwerk

It’s perhaps not surprising that Kraftwerk came out of Germany. Their cool embrace of mechanization sits well with the Teutonic stereotype. Their love of technology was so complete that they built their own studio with equipment they designed, and they even had life-size manikins of themselves made to send to photo shoots and interviews. They are notoriously private and don’t work with anybody else. Even Michael Jackson’s request to work with them was met with a curt and firm no. They shun almost all interviews, but I do remember reading once about Ralf Hutter, one of the group’s founders. The interviewer followed him around for a few hours and noticed that Ralf liked to carry a small pair of scissors with him wherever he went. Then, if he found himself in some public space where Muzak was being piped in, a hotel or shopping mall or something, he would find the speakers and cut their wires. His contention was that music was so prevalent that it was quickly becoming meaningless. Music should be savored and enjoyed, not washed over you indiscriminately, he explained, as he tucked his scissors back into his pocket, a silent wire dangling from the elevator wall.

I wasn’t the only one who responded to Kraftwerk’s clean utopian mechanization. Inner city black DJs in NYC started playing their records at dances. One group, Soulsonic Force, had an early rap hit with a track they called Planet Rock which was nothing but a slightly reordered combination of a track from Kraftwerk’s 1977 benchmark album Trans-Europe Express (widely considered (but not by me) the best album in their arsenal) and the rhythm track from the song Numbers, found on Computer World. At the same time, DJ’s in Detroit started playing Kraftwerk at dances and modeling their own dance music after the German pioneers. The combination of cheap electronics and a fondness for the mechanization and celebrated artifice of Kraftwerk led to the birth of techno, which started the whole rave culture and set the groundwork for today’s burgeoning electronica scene. It’s curious that Kraftwerk, a group accused (not unfairly) of being soulless, should be so embraced by those groups most frequently associated with soul, growing up in the bloated, empty shadow of Motown.

Kraftwerk went into hiding after their next album, Electric Café, hit the stores in 1986, and, except for one single – Expo 2000 – produced for the turn of the millennium, they remained silent for almost 18 years (beating out Peter Gabriel and XTC for the longest dormant without being dead record), although the word is that the two founders, Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, still got together to play music with each other and their beloved machines every day. Finally, they broke their silence with 2003’s Tour de France Soundtracks, an expansion of a single released 20 years earlier. The tracks sound great and entirely up-to-date, without significantly updating their sound, and the famous bike race is a fitting subject for their interest and enthusiasm for the man/machine interface. They have even recently started touring again, showing up at festivals and raves and getting ecstatic receptions from legions of fans who weren’t born when Kraftwerk first laid out the plans for the future of music, a future that has come to full fruition under their watchful mechanical eyes.

Because of their vision and appeal and their steadfast integrity, Kraftwerk became one of the most significant cornerstones of contemporary music. Their embrace of technology and computers anticipated the wired Y2K world by 30 years. Today, anybody who uses a synthesizer or enjoys dance music owes a huge debt, whether acknowledged or not, to the soulless power station from Germany. And that, G, is why Kraftwerk is so important.