Music |
Kraftwerk
By
Published: Apr 10, 2012
Category:
Rock
It starts tonight. It’s the place to be. Sadly, it’s sold out. All eight nights. 2,500 tickets gone in a flash.
Better believe some very cool people will be standing outside the Museum of Modern Art, begging.
And for what?
Kraftwerk.
This four-man German group formed in 1970. Only one of the originals will be at MOMA, but no matter — over eight nights, Kraftwerk will give live performances and 3-D visualizations of their studio albums, one each night.
They’re not musicians any more.
They’re artists.
For me, they always were.
You may recall Kraftwerk from their one hit — “Autobahn” — released in forever-ago 1974. It began with the vroom of a car engine, a horn beeping, and then, against catchy synthesizers, they sang these lyrics, in German:
We are driving on the Autobahn
In front of us is a wide valley
The sun is shining with glittering rays
The driving strip is a grey track
White stripes, green edge
We are switching the radio on
From the speaker it sounds:
We are driving on the Autobahn
“Autobahn” was cheery. And why not? The band’s name means “power station” in German, and their songs were about everyday realities: cars, atomic power, trains, radios. [To buy the quite wonderful 23-minute download of “Autobahn” click here. Or, better, their 11-song greatest hits CD, “The Mix. [To buy the CD from Amazon from $6.50, click here. For the $9.99 MP3 download, click here.]
On the surface — and you can say Kraftwerk was all about surface — everything about this group is ironic fun. The neat row of synthesizers. The four thin men in slicked-down hair, dark suits, dark shirts, narrow ties. And the bouncy, repetitive music that suggests the liberation we gain when our world is linked — this was in 1981, mind you — by computers.
Below the surface, there was much more, for Kraftwerk’s real subject was what lay beneath those realities: the triumph of the machine, especially the computer. In our country, we like to think computers are our friends and factories are the engines of full employment. The world’s first digital band knew different. They saw a “man-machine,” the merger of technology and humanity — with people subservient to the machines they had created.
This is not a new idea, especially in Germany. You can see it most graphically in the films of Fritz Lang, especially his 1927 masterpiece, “Metropolis.” Lang’s city may have many marvels, but the factory reigns supreme. The workers shuffle in, ruled by the clock. They repeat the same task, endlessly. And then they shuffle out. Like tech workers in, say, China today — Lang was kind of a prophet.
Some smarty took Lang’s movie — which was silent, with a live orchestra providing music — and set the music of Kraftwerk against it for a video. It’s a chilling combination. Watch:
I look at those images and I see a history of the 20th century that we’d prefer not to think about — from Nazi regimentation to the jobs that fill the days for too many of us. I may hear cool beauty and hypnotic rhythms, but I don’t for a minute think I’m witnessing a “celebration” of anything I’d like a second helping of. And, in music business terms, that’s how it’s been: no one followed Kraftwerk, the band stands alone.
For me, the prize CD is “Trans Europe Express.” [To buy the CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
Kraftwerk has said this 1977 CD is about a modern, mostly liberated Europe. But I started listening to it in the fall of 1977, when three members of a German terrorist group — the Baader-Meinhof Gang, sometimes known as the Red Army Faction — died in their cells in Stammheim Prison. The official verdict was suicide. The official verdict was not widely believed; Andreas Baader, for example, was shot in the back of the head.
Gerhard Richter, the greatest German artist of the last half century, created 15 paintings about the RAF: blurred portraits, imaginings of their deaths, a sense of the mob of young people who sympathized with their rejection of Germany’s post-war boom. They’re brilliant paintings. And modern. And chilling.
In 1977, I was struggling to write a novel about German terrorists who hide out one summer where you’d least expect them: the Hamptons. Well, a little more than hide out — they have a list of targets. The story I created terrified me, and so did the music I listened to as I wrote: “Trans Europe Express,” over and over.
Play this music when it’s quiet and dark, and you too may be spooked. That’s not a bad thing, just a statement of how smart these guys were and how far they could see. And why, forty years after they stood in front of synthesizers and played music that was totally original, they’re a standing-room-only event.
BONUS VIDEOS
