Kraftwerk: Much more than Kraut, and not sauer yet

ODES TO TECHNOLOGY

Kraftwerk: Much more than Kraut, and not sauer yet

While load-shedding is on hold, it would be remiss not to look back at the German band that revolutionised music in 1975 after renaming itself from Organisation to the German word that means ‘power station'. FRED DE VRIES recalls the origin story of what became affectionately known as ‘Krautrock’.

CELESTE THERON
CELESTE THERON

IF YOU think 2024 was musically dull and predictable, cast your mind back to 1974, the year that could easily qualify as “the most dreadful year in pop".

Let’s dissect it briefly. The progressive rock of bands such as Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer was hopelessly entangled in its own blinding virtuosity. Glam rock was now the domain of overweight sexual predators in platform boots, that is, Gary Glitter instead of Marc Bolan. Punk was still in the womb. What we were left with were the safe and insipid sounds from artists such as Steely Dan, Billy Joel, Elton John, Electric Light Orchestra and ABBA.

The glam rock era with Garry Glitter.
The glam rock era with Garry Glitter.
Image: CELESTE THERON

But while the year was dozing to a close, keen observers detected a strong eastern breeze. From their headquarters in Düsseldorf, four nerdy Germans had launched a new electronic sound, a genre if you like, under the name of Kraftwerk. It would turn the music world upside down. Their ideas would be picked up in pop, techno, disco and hip hop – from Gary Numan, NewOrder and Depeche Mode to Afrika Bambaata, Public Enemy, Donna Summer and Carl Craig. David Bowie namechecked Kraftwerk founder Florian Schneider in his song “V-2Schneider”, and even Madonna, Miley Cyrus and Coldplay have used Kraftwerk samples in their music. The album Autobahn bleeped the dawning of a new era. The record was released in November 1974, but it would take a good few months until its impact was properly felt.

Side A of the vinyl version was what it was all about: a 22:43 minute composition, hypnotically depicting a car ride on the German highway system, die Autobahn. We hear an ignition key being turned, followed by an engine starting. Then we travel through a country without speed limits. We fall into a trance while hearing the Doppler effect of passing cars, we hear honking, and we hear the song itself being played over a car radio.


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Driving as liberation. “Driving is fun,” said Kraftwerk percussionist Wolfgang Flür. “We had no speed limit on the autobahn, we could race over the highways, through the Alps (...) We used to drive a lot, we used to listen to the sound of driving, the wind, the passing cars and lorries, the rain, every moment the sounds around you are changing, and the idea was to rebuild those sounds on the synth.” In musical terms you can hear ambient, drops, techno bleeps, EDM, harmonic arpeggio’s, everything that would make music interesting again for the next 50 years or so.

Image: CELESTE THERON

And every now and then we hear a mechanical voice that largely limits itself to the mantra “Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n auf der Autobahn.” That vocal melody may have sounded like a Teutonic variation on The Beach Boys (“Fun, Fun, Fun” is often mentioned, but I also hear “Barbara Ann”), but there’s very little to remind us of the pop music that was in vogue at the time. The sound is fresh and delightful, the song smells of freedom. What stays with the listener is the image of a car that takes you zooming through the country, past valleys and sun-drenched landscapes, with the endless white line as your only guide. There is no obvious social critique in the lyrics or music – it is about a blissful alliance between man and machine.

It is a tribute to technology, made on instruments that were not common at the time: synthesisers. Ralf Hütter plays the bass tones on his Minimoog, Schneider provides the melody on his ARP Odyssey and Flür conjures up the thin rhythms from his drum machine. Far in the background we can still detect “traditional” instruments such as flute, violin and guitar, largely played by Klaus Röder, who would leave the band soon after Autobahn.

Kraftwerk co-founder Ralf Hütter called the group’s sound “industrial folk music”, a term intended to illustrate this new German identity. “Germany also needed something like The Beach Boys,” explained Flür. “Something with self-understanding and immaculate presence, after the ugly wars that our parents had inflicted on the world. Something positive and youthful, that freed us from the stench of the past.”

The sound is not the only startling thing about Autobahn. Check out the cover. It is a kitschy painting of an idyllic landscape defined by generous sunlight, rolling hills, green meadows, a blue sky and cars on the highway: Man, machine and nature in perfect harmony. In the left lane a black Mercedes approaches us, the preferred vehicle for Nazi leaders; in the right lane, driving towards the light, we see a VW Beetle. The two cars symbolise the old and the new Germany, grim fascism versus postwar reconstruction.

And what about the usual group photo? Well, the four faces of the Kraftwerk members stare at us from the rear-view mirror. The sleeve was designed by visual artist Emil Schult, who is often called “Kraftwerk’s fifth Beatle”. Schult, writes Steve Francis Tupai in Computer World (Bloomsbury, 2022) was Kraftwerk’s “vibrations manager", “the guru”. Schult himself has said that he had “an influence on everything”. He certainly left a strong mark on Autobahn. In addition to designing the cover, he also wrote the simple yet effective lyrics of the title track.

Moreover, he was the one who pushed for a different image, a new look, away from the cliché of the long-haired hippie in worn-out denims, which had dominated the rock world since the late 1960s. Apart from Röder all Kraftwerk members look squeaky clean, boring even, representing an ego-free futurism, which was unprecedented in the world of serious pop and rock, where bands like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin had lifted narcissism to unprecedented heights.

The album was conceived and partly recorded in the Kling Klang Studio that Kraftwerk had set up in an industrial park just outside Düsseldorf. The idea of a private creative space was inspired by Andy Warhol’s Factory in Manhattan, New York, a place where musicians, artists, designers, filmmakers, models and drug dealers would come together to further Warhol’s projects. The Kraftwerk version was less decadent, but equally intense. In the studio they could endlessly experiment and refine their soundscapes, bleeps and beats. They referred to themselves not as musicians but as “music workers", and spent an average of eight to ten hours a day in the studio. Hütter called Kling Klang (derived from the German verb and noun for “sound”) “the mothership”. The studio, he said, was an additional instrument.

Initially, nothing happened with Autobahn. It was too new, too strange. Some critics completely trashed it. “Spineless, emotionless sound with no variety, less taste,” wrote Keith Ging in the leading British music magazine Melody Maker, adding a piece of advice: “For God's sake, take the robots out of music again." But then the epic title track was brought back to 3:28 minutes and the song was released as a single. It worked. The tune was first picked up by a radio station in Chicago, after which it steadily climbed to number 25 on the Billboard 100, making it the very first German-language hit single in America. The LP followed suit and reached fifth place in the American charts, while it reached a number 4 spot in England. Autobahn was also released here, and made it to number 15.

An electronic song in the hit parade was not entirely new. Two years earlier, the song “Popcorn” had hit the charts. But “Popcorn” was an annoying throwaway ditty, made by anonymous musicians. Kraftwerk was different, the Germans were no one-hit wonders, and Autobahn was anything but a novelty. In a 1975 interview with the American music journalist Lester Bangs, Ralf Hütter explained his musical vision: “We are the first German group to sing in its own language, we use our electronic background and create a Central European identity for ourselves."

In September 1975, the four gentlemen (Röder had been replaced by Karl Bartos) appeared on the BBC, where they performed Autobahn in the science and technology programme Tomorrow’s World. Two members stood behind synthesisers, the other two appeared to be hitting cooking utensils with knitting needles. They wore suits, shirts and ties. Their hair was short and neatly combed – they resembled civil servants or bank clerks. Their first names lit up in light blue neon: Florian, Ralf, Karl and Wolfgang. “We offered self-confidence,” explained Flür in Uncut magazine. “We wanted to show our German appearance with short-cropped hair, ironed suits and ties, not to imitate English pop or American rock. We knew our appearance was ironic, flirtatious, provocative.” Towards the end of the song, Florian looks into the camera with a cheeky smile, as if to say, “Wir habenes geschaft – we did it."

Of course, Autobahn wasn’t an immaculate conception. Kraftwerk had been founded in 1970, and when Autobahn hit the charts, the band already had three albums to its name. Co-founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider were both born shortly after the end of World War 2, and grew up in a wealthy environment. Hütter’s father was an architect, while Schneider’s dad traded in silk. His grandfather was a Nazi. Florian and Ralf were awkward teenagers. One played the flute in the school orchestra, the other had mastered the Hammond organ, not exactly instruments to attract girls.

The two young men met at the Düsseldorf Conservatory. Düsseldorf had been heavily damaged during the war, but had recovered and had developed into the chic, modern centre of the industrial Ruhr area. Düsseldorf now signified “culture", particularly art and fashion. Hütter and Schneider thrived there. They looked in awe at the factories that had sprung up along the Ruhr, symbolic of the economic miracle that was meant to neutralise the horrific war memories.

Based on what they had learnt at the conservatory, the pair started a jazz ensemble but soon switched to experimental music. They called themselves Organisation and came up with compositions marked by unusual sounds and lengthy improvisations, related to the underground rock that was in vogue at the time: Mothers of Invention, Jefferson Airplane, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd. Organisation made one album, Tone Float, which was released in 1970. We hear Hütter on organ, while Schneider puts his lips to various flutes and also plays bells, triangle, tambourine and electric violin. The album died a quiet death, but these days original copies fetch around R15 000. Hütter and Schneider named their next project Kraftwerk, German for power station.

Initially, they continued the somewhat unfocused, experimental path of Organisation, and linked up with other pioneering German bands such as Neu!, Can, Tangerine Dream, Faust and Amon Düül, whose work began to make waves outside Germany. The British music press labelled it Krautrock, a tasteless reference to World War 2 when the Allies called the Germans “Krauts", sauerkraut eaters. The Germans preferred Deutschrock and Kosmische Rock, but to no avail: Krautrock was what would stick.

What all these musicians had in common was an urge to experiment and to move away from the Anglo-Saxon influences, away from the blues and rock 'n' roll. Their cultural hinterland was not Chicago, San Francisco or New York, but Central Europe, with Franz Schubert and Karlheinz Stockhausen as benchmarks. They were part of the first postwar generation, who abhorred the recent past – the war, Nazism, the Holocaust. They grew up among the ruins and craters left behind by the Allied bombers. They had no role models, no heroes. “We had no fathers,” said Hütter.

American rock music may have been the initial inspiration, but at the same time the Americans were the occupying force, with army bases in various parts of West Germany. Germany needed its own culture that it could be proud of again. “After the war, the German entertainment industry was destroyed, ” said Hütter. “The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off, and know where to feel American music and where to feel ourselves. We are the first German group to record in our own language, use our electronic background, and create a Central European identity for ourselves."

It was on the third album, 1973’s Ralf und Florian, that this vision began to take shape, with the synthesiser taking on a more dominant role. “The synthesiser responds extremely well to the human hand, ” said Hütter. “They are talked about as cold machines, but as soon as you put another person behind the synthesiser, it responds in a different way. I think it is much more sensitive than a traditional instrument like a guitar."

With Autobahn the concept reached its initial peak – Kraftwerk had redefined the rules of pop. The New York Times went as far as comparing them to The Beatles. What the Beatles are to rock music, Kraftwerk is to electronic dance music, observed the paper. “The band laid down a blueprint for the music's future, developing an automated, impersonal sound that although it seems ultra-intellectual and European, slipped across barriers of race, class and nationality like mercury." This was just the beginning. What followed was a series of brilliant, ever-innovative albums: Radio-Activity, Trans-Europe Express, The Man Machine and Computer World.

But in the end, even the members of Kraftwerk turned out to be mere human: in 2008 Schneider left the band. It has never become entirely clear why. According to some, it had to do with an argument over a bicycle pump.

Anyway, this was just a very long way of saying: Don’t lose hope, pop will always find a way to reinvent itself.

VWB


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