Machines making music. Repetitive, metronomic, locked-in beats. Voices processed to sound as inexpressive as robots. A warning, and an embrace, of technology as both the shaper and subject of songs, of the ever-growing human codependence with the inhuman. In 21st-century art, especially music, these ideas and sounds are inescapable.
Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, the German musicians at the core of Kraftwerk, were already committed to those concepts way back in the analog 1970s, when synthesizers were primitive and the idea of a pop group as a “man-machine” was revolutionary. (The original German, “Die Mensch-Maschine,” isn’t gendered; it means “Human-Machine.”) In an era of plush FM-radio pop, disco sensuality and punk rawness, Kraftwerk’s music was mechanical and coolly austere instead. Meanwhile, their songs sensed the coming digital era: impassive and heartless, but also seductive in its precision and possibility.
Indirectly and directly, Kraftwerk’s music would quickly provide templates for popular music to come. Its songs showed the way toward synth-pop, electropop, techno and countless varieties of electronic dance music. And Kraftwerk’s crisp, flat electronic drum sounds and the synthesizer line of “Trans-Europe Express” were picked up by Afrika Bambaataa for his 1982 “Planet Rock,” a cornerstone single in hip-hop’s discography.
Hütter, Kraftwerk’s machine-tuned vocalist and main lyricist, credited Schneider, who died last month, as the group’s “sound fetishist.” While Hütter and other band members wrote some of Kraftwerk’s poppiest songs, Schneider was the one who coaxed the sound of Kraftwerk out of clunky 1970s technology and, through the years, deployed an ever-updated array of hardware and software. Schneider honed and then expanded Kraftwerk’s synthetic vocabulary of non-naturalistic blips, clicks and buzzes, Vocoder harmonies and tones sustained beyond human breath, echoes and reverberations that did not come out of physical spaces.
Schneider left Kraftwerk in 2008. More recently, Hütter’s Kraftwerk has been performing (and sonically tweaking) its catalog from the 1970s through the early 2000s, reaping well-deserved recognition for the ways Kraftwerk transformed popular music.
Here are 10 essential songs that Schneider co-wrote and co-produced.
Kraftwerk, ‘Ruckzuck’ (1970)
Before Kraftwerk tightened its songs into terse pop structures, its music grew out of the hypnotic late-1960s German rock movement known as kosmische. The current Kraftwerk has renounced its early albums, but “Ruckzuck” (which means “in a flash”), from its self-titled 1970 album, now seems to bridge early and latter-day Kraftwerk. It begins with Schneider playing the flute, the instrument he soon gave up for synthesizers, as a rhythm instrument, syncopating one note over a drone. The beat, though played on a physical drum kit, feels like one of later Kraftwerk’s methodical midtempo pulses — until things go psychedelically haywire.
Kraftwerk, ‘Autobahn’ (1974)
A car door slams, an engine revs up, a horn honks. Then a road trip becomes a hermetic 22-minute journey — it feels like the car windows never open — through changing territory. With sustained chords swooping above an octave-hopping bass line, “Autobahn” is as smooth as a half-remembered Beach Boys song in the early section that was excerpted to become a pop single. Then there are other vehicles swooping by, a droning straightaway, some fiddling with the car radio and some blissful cruising on motifs that were slipped into the song early on.
Kraftwerk, ‘Radioactivity’ (1975)
Kraftwerk’s first version of “Radioactivity,” before it retrofitted lyrics about events like Chernobyl, was cagey about whether it was a dirge for a nuclear accident, or a celebration of how pop radio can spread a song: “Tune into the melody/Radioactivity, is in the air for you and me.” But a sense of alarm was always there in its Morse-code blips, its insistent repeated bass notes and its minor-key synthesizer line, punctuated by whooshes like steam escaping a safety valve.
Kraftwerk, ‘The Robots’ (1978)
“The Robots” starts like gadgets warming up, then gets a rhythm track so slyly propulsive that it has been sampled dozens of times, full of question-and-answer phrases: a bass line that hops between high and low, a synthesizer hook behind the deadpan “We are the robots” that immediately gets a four-note reply. Every so often, there’s an interlude where the robots might be singing (in Russian) to themselves.
Kraftwerk, ‘Neon Lights’ (1978)
Shimmering repeat-echoes surround many of the keyboard tones in “Neon Lights,” an unabashed ballad that is one of Kraftwerk’s most angst-free songs. Over major chords, its handful of lyrics celebrate how “At the fall of night, this city’s made of light.” Its urban soundscape is uncluttered and unhurried, floating in the midrange over a simple beat, and its long wordless coda launches an extended synthesizer line to soar overhead.
Kraftwerk, ‘Home Computer’ (1981)
Skeletal but decidedly funky, “Home Computer” features some trademark early Kraftwerk sounds, contrasting crispness and haze: a bass line with a hint of being plucked, a muffled four-on-the-floor thump, bits of hiss turned into simulated cymbal accents, some keyboard hooks that waft in with no clear attack and others that ping sharply. Between its chanted verses, “Home Computer” goes abstract; with a beat, tinkly sounds and cheerfully dissonant arpeggios, who needs a chorus?
Kraftwerk, ‘Boing Boom Tschak’ (1986)
While hip-hop was listening to Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk had clearly been listening to hip-hop. This track is brash and mid-1980s boombox-ready, built on onomatopoetic, pitch-shifted vocal syllables that double as percussion and drums that sound like exploding balloons — well aware of how brittle every sound can be.
Kraftwerk, ‘Techno Pop’ (1986)
“Techno Pop” segues out of “Boing Boom Tschak” and immediately widens its palette: with unpitched thuds and clanks, with percussion suggesting xylophones alongside pots and pans, with electronics that can buzz or beep and with a hook that travels from simulated viola and string section to quasi-organ to bell tones. The constantly mutating track delivers what the lyrics promise: “synthetic electronic sounds/industrial rhythms all around.”
Kraftwerk, ‘Chrono’ (2003)
Bouncy with a nervous undercurrent, “Chrono,” from the “Tour de France” album, puts organ-like tones through all kinds of meltdowns: pitches warping, patterns unraveling, notes reversing. One of the album’s recurring tunes and some French spoken words appear near the end, but they’ve been thoroughly undermined.
Florian Schneider, ‘Stop Plastic Pollution’ (2015)
The sight of village fishermen in Ghana hauling in plastic garbage prompted Schneider to release “Stop Plastic Pollution,” with lyrics as blunt as its title. The music is denser and more nuanced: burbles and drips and whooshing wave sounds, but also a viscous, submerged funk vamp that sounds like it’s being detected on sonar.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
