I got into Kraftwerk around the same time I got into (or back into if you count passive exposure during childhood) ABBA. It’s odd to think now of those two bands together, but in the early 90s they were just European (Eurotrash in the parlance of the times) bands from the 70s who had some notoriety with their very European sounding—i.e. slightly off—takes on pop music. Heard on cheap tapes purchased from the $4.99 music end caps at the Jamesway in Kingston, NY (I've been told that this particular Jamesway may have been in Rhinebeck, NY, which would add another layer of Teutonic patina to this tale).
One of the more provocative and productive quotations from Joshua Clover’s excellent 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About is the following:
“Every genre enters the popular imagination as a novelty song that is later seen to be a manifesto, a discourse on a new form. Consider how strange ‘Rapper’s Delight’ once seemed—or ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ To turn matters on their head, one might say that there are no novelty songs, only failed genres; this is perhaps to say that there are no insurrections, only failed revolutions.”
In the early 90s, it wouldn’t have been hard to see Kraftwerk as a one-hit-wonder with a novelty song: “Autobahn” had been a minor hit in the U.S. charts (bigger one in the UK) in 1974. Eventually “Trans-Europe Express” have some play in the discos in the late 70s. In 2013, when Kraftwerk were set to play their series of album performances at the Tate Modern, the Telegraph led their story with the headline: “Kraftwerk: the most influential band in pop history?” It would have seemed absurd to me (and probably to most people) if someone told me that the showroom dummies and robots that made this tape would eventually be considered potentially more influential than the Beatles. From the perspective of 2020, this hardly seems a controversial position. It’s obvious that their few scattered hits (including “Computer Love” and “the Model” both charting #1 in the UK) were indeed manifestos, discourses on a new form.
And, like the Beatles, it’s hard to say anything about Kraftwerk without falling into cliche or reiterating already known facts. I will say, as much as people talk about their influence on all that came after, not much is made about their own geniuses at crafting albums. Even leaving aside the first three albums, which they pretty much disowned sadly, the run they had from 1974-1981 is astounding. Each album explored a thematic element and, if you purchase the beautiful vinyl reissues from 2009, contained meticulously designed accompanying artwork. What runs through all of these albums conceptually is the tension between the use of electronic instruments in the service of conservative or old-fashioned technology/culture. The artwork for Radio-Activity plays on the word (in German as well) transforming the substance of cold war nightmares into a nostalgia for an imaginary Telefunken world of matching suits, oversized microphones and graphics that recall 1940s and 50s visions of a telegraphic future. By contrast, the artwork for Trans-Europe Express is all late 19th and early 20th century Deutsche Kultur: Franz Schubert and countryside by train; the great irony of the music sheet on the front defaced with doodles and doppelgänger notes crashing into one another; the tinted photography from studios around the world, each one embossing its signature on their respective photograph’s corner.
There’s no doubt something unsettling about the romanticizing of German culture and technology, especially in the post-war era. Turning such things into the fodder of novelty songs, eventual manifesto or no, is not without its disquieting reification of the past. Even the seemingly forward looking Man-Machine is really just an echo of Soviet and constructivist art—the original historical context for the word Robotnik—and fraught with its own historical catastrophes. And this period of the band’s career concludes with Computer World, a prescient cataloging of the ways “business, money, numbers and people” are aggregated into a computer world of capital and technology. In the context of the earlier albums’ pastoral and nostalgic commingling of the technological and the natural, it’s hard not to understand Computer World as the loss of that, right at the moment when Kraftwerk would become musically synonymous with the new computer world we were entering.
By design, Kraftwerk were not supposed to have individualities, but, nonetheless, individualities did come out. It seemed that, as much as Kraftwerk wanted to be the robots that made robot music, it was pointed out in every interview how much they liked bike riding and the countryside. What comes across listening to The Robots tape today isn’t so much a brave new world of technology, nor a reactionary warning about what will happen in our computer world. Rather, Kraftwerk’s best work sounds like what every other vision of the future sounds like in hindsight: a nostalgia for a future that was always a hope, just not for us.
It’s hard not to hear what is so likable in their catchier songs like “the Model” and “the Robots,” with the later being, of course, the preferred song of choice for any funky robot dances (would we even know what a funky robot would sound like if Kraftwerk hadn’t introduced us to them?). There is also a deep melancholia to their music as well: a longing for something that either has receded into the past or in a future yet to come. It is this constant state of longing, echoed both in the human and computer-treated voices, that makes even objects in the present out of reach: has there ever been a more sad, beautiful song composed to something as banal as “Neon Lights?” In our popular imagination neon connotes the city and its lascivious temptations. In Kraftwerk’s ode, as with so much of their music, there’s a magic and loss to the shimmer just over the horizon.
