Artist of the Week 2011-04-04 KRAFTWERK

[dogstar]

Guess this might be a tough sell as I’m straying a long way from the usual country/alt-country/rock pastures. But hey here goes. For my money Kraftwerk are the greatest band of all time and their influence has dominated the music of the last thirty to forty years year. There would be no hip-hop, no modern r'n'b and no techno music without Kraftwerk. There would be no 'Trans' by Neil Young and Pink Floyd might never have sent out a surrogate band whilst performing the wall. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Derrick May, one of the originators of techno, identified the influence of Kraftwerk ‘it was just classy and clean, and to us it was beautiful, like outer space. Living around Detroit, there was so little beauty... everything is an ugly mess in Detroit, and so we were attracted to this music. It, like, ignited our imagination!’

Kraftwerk’s music was influenced by the classical music of Stockhasuen (completely unlistenable to my ears) but also by a rejection of the dominant American music of the late 60 and early 70’s (though strangely not the Beach Boys). They also looked back to German culture before the Nazi’s came to power, back to the Bauhaus movement’s simplicity(Ralf Hutter was an architecture student). And they looked forward to the future, much of their music is obsessed with technology.

Their first three albums (Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2 and Ralf and Florian) don’t really concern us here being experimental rock albums. I don’t own these albums and the only real point of note is that two of the guys that played on them, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, left the band and went on to form Neu!

‘Fun, Fun, Fun on the Autobahn’

With the release of the album Autobahn in 1974 things started to get interesting. This album saw the band using synthesisers, electronic percussion (that looks like knitting needles tapping on saucepan lids) and vocoders for the first time. This is also the first time I remember being aware of them, they appeared on a science programme on the BBC called Tomorrow’s World.



The first of their great songs, ‘Autobahn’ starts with a car door slamming and then turns into a celebration of the joys of speeding along on the German motorways (at 100 mph?) with a tune that borrows heavily from the Beach Boys

CHERNOBYL
HARRISBURG
SELLAFIELD
FUKUSHIMA

The success of the Autobahn album allowed the band to build their own recording studio, the mythical Kling Klang studio in Dusseldorf, Germany. This allowed the band to produce their own music rather than relying on outside producers and also to continue their obsession with building their own equipment. 1975 saw the release of the Radio-Activity album. A themed album, with half the songs being about radioactivity and the other half about activity on the radio the album wasn’t as commercially successful as the previous album. It does however display one of the things I really love about the band and that is their sense of humour. Song titles like “Ohm sweet ohm” and “Radio stars” hint at a less serious side of the band.

This is the big tune off the album and seems as important today as when it was first released



TRAINS AND THE FUNKINESS

And then came this



‘Planet Rock’ is one of the seminal hip-hop tunes. And it’s basically two Kraftwerk tracks welded together by Afrika Bambaata and Arthur Baker. The beats come from ‘Numbers’, but the melody is lifted straight off the song ‘Transeuropean Express’.

‘Transeuropean Express’ was the band’s next album released in 1977 and is widely regarded as their finest work. The title track forms part of a suite of songs including ‘Metal on metal’ and ‘Franz Schubert’. The whole piece refers back to the rhythmic repetition of ‘Autobahn’ but also Bowies ‘Station to Station’. The main track on the other side of the album is ‘Showroom Dummies’ a reference to the bands less than lively stage presence.

ROBOTS AND MODELS



Kraftwerk’s obsession with identity and also with technology reached its peak on the ‘Man Machine’ album. ‘The Robots’ saw them sending out a surrogate band of robots to perform instead of the band. They wrote songs about the ‘Man Machine’ and had a number one song in the UK about ‘The Model’.



‘I program my home computer, Beam myself in to the future’

Next comes my favourite album by Kraftwerk ‘Computerworld’. Once again we are looking into the future. This album was released in 1981 about the same time that computers were finding their way into school classrooms (at our school of 1,500 kids we had 3 computers for the whole school) and calculators were becoming common. I suspect Neil Young may have been listening to this album before he recorded ‘Trans’ as there is a lot of common ground between the two.





One of my favourite stories involving the band, and I think another demonstration fo their sense of humour, relates to Coldplay asking permission to use the melody from Computerworld on their song ‘Talk’. Chris Martin apparently wrote a long letter asking for permission to use the song. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between various lawyers he eventually received a letter from the Kling Klang studios which had one word on it ‘Yes’.

TOUR DE FRANCE

The last great moment in Kraftwerks history was the release of the single ‘Tour de France’. Originally recorded as part of the sessions for Electric Cafe the song was a tribute to the greatest cycling race in the world and reflected Ralf Hutter's love of cycling.



There are two other studio albums, Electric Cafe and Tour de France Soundtracks (which includes Tour de France) but these represent a gradual decline in the bands powers. There is also a remix album called appropriately enough ’The Mix’. And finally there is ‘Maximum, Minimum’ which is the live album recorded on the bands 2004 world tour and is basically a greatest hits package.

[4sooner]

Nice writeup dogstar.
The only thing I've really heard from these guys is the Autobahn record. One of my buddies back in high school had the 8-track version. He loved it and the rest of us were forced to accept it when we were out partying in his car. I actually grew to like it, though not a fan of techno in general. And I never thought of the Help Me Rhonda influence from the Beach Boys,but then we were not exactly doing any critical listening when we were in that particular car.
Anyway, good job. I'mm gonna dl some of the stuff and give it a revisit.

[Penny Lane]

wow, thanks dogstar. i'm not into the music but the background and context of the albums is really interesting! music obsessed with technology...kind of the opposite of what we like and are used to here. they should have said just "No" to Chris Martin, would have been funnier.

[beantownbubba]

There would be no hip-hop, no modern r'n'b and no techno music without Kraftwerk. There would be no 'Trans' by Neil Young and Pink Floyd might never have sent out a surrogate band whilst performing the wall.

You say that like it's a good thing.

Not sure about the "no hip-hop" thing, tho. Granted, "Planet Rock's" an important record, but I'm not sure it was THAT important.

Anyway, many thanks and pats on the back for your heroic effort, dogstar!

[linkous]

No Hip Hop without Kraftwerk? Sorry can't have that. Hip Hop rose from Jamaican music amongst other things, but did in some cases reference Kraftwerk. No Trans without Kraftwerk? And this is a good thing?

[scotto]

Good write-up. And Radio-Activity is a fun record. Long live the analog synthesizer!
Besides, without Kraftwerk, we also may have missed out on this:

[dogstar]