Kraftwerk were the pioneers of “noise music”. They engineered sounds out of complicated pieces of equipment, which hold a loose resemblance to synthesizers of today. The band represented itself as working parts of a machine. They had made this statement by wearing suits and at one point presenting themselves in a socialist-communist color scheme and presentation to their shows. The big deal was that influential and pop-rock at the time followed the formula of exposed chest, guyliner and tussled emo hair. Kraftwerk’s sound was generally noise arranged in the fashion of a classical piece of music with a central theme, sometimes profoundly direct and rigid, other times a vivid, fading dream upon which sounds and arrangement was initially based on. What made Kraftwerk stand out was their electronic interpretation of pop.
Their albums throughout 1974-1981 were a mix of successes and flops. Their international fourth album hit Autobahnwas a success in several ways. The song played on German word play. The chorus (if you could call it that) lyric to the 22+ minute song is “Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn” [5] which, by no accident sounds a bit like the Beach Boys and any American singing would usually be found singing along “ Fun fun fun on the Autobahn”. The album-titled song proved to be a bit of movie music, a bit of Beach Boy fun, all with a robotic, engine-like rhythm of a car. Their sixth album in 1977 was a flop and never made it for airplay in the U.S. and most of Europe. Karl Bartos, one of the interchangeable group members recalls [6] “clearing the dancefloor in France when the album was introduced at a club [they] were visiting.”
Before Afrikaa Baambaataa and company added a sense of rhythm and dance-ability to their music and the like, Kraftwerk enjoyed an impressive stint at being a pivotal force in electronic music. Although letting go of the wheel of electronic foreground and innovation once Breaks, House and Acid music hit their respective markets and changed the face of the predominantly underground culture. Once creative and successful interpolation simply comprising of programmers and sonic innovators, now found a way to be successful front men and achieved a status of artists. With classical backgrounds and influence in arrangement, etc. they had recruited “pieces” to complete the machine that was Kraftwerk. These were usually musicians, also classically trained, but the show belonged Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider.
Besides being sampled and imitated for years to come, with elements still presiding in House music today, Kraftwerk paved the idea of pop music to what it is today; lyrical folklore usually revolving social activities involving loud music, alcohol, mention or overtone of sex, and always in an establishment such as a club. Generally having a good time, generally appealing to a specific market to include party-goers and people with money to “pop all those bottles”, but I digress. The point is its less organic and less about arrangement or intricate production due to the technology that’s available and it’s all predominantly technologically-palleted and is more about what It sounds like in a club than anything else. Not to mention the amount of synthesizer-intensive pop hits out there that are not necessarily “techno” in nature. Kraftwerk influenced David Bowie and prompted him to explore technological aspect of music creation throughout his career.
As a listener, Kraftwerk is weird and hopeful and industrial-without-being-grundgy-or-filthy-to-achieve-it kind of way. It represents the beginning of something that wasn’t as organic or as presentable as people were used to, but it dually managed to erase the point at which man is man and is now made a cog in a machine. A machine that would explore tape manipulated through filters, combined with oscillators, arranged as a classical piece and form a cohesive, representative and themed piece of art. Engineers who became artists. Brilliant. As a music producer their work seems to drag on and seems to go off on tangents, but sweetly get back to them and attempt to finish them off grandly, in a classic fashion. I would look at their work as more of a map or a palette from which to dig into, explore and formulate a temporal translation into something familiar using nostalgia as well as current musical trends to achieve success. To then ask yourself: “ok, where does this awesome sound come from?” I was magically surprised to find by the end of the quoted documentary that most of the sounds I grew up on with Breaks and Trance were directly sampled or expanded on concepts Kraftwerk laid out for future generations. This blew my mind wide to the possibilities of even my work to be a guiding foundation for a successful, musical formula that others will emulate and expand, make better and temporally translate.
- Chuma
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