Kraftwerk, Prophets of the 21st Century

Today brought the sad news of the death of Florian Schneider, co-founder of Kraftwerk. It is safe to say that there are only a handful of musical artists who were truly revolutionary, and Kraftwerk fits the bill. They pioneered electronic music, but also permanently changed pop music's beat. There's a reason they were sampled on early hip-hop milestones like "Planet Rock." I have all their classic albums on vinyl, it is a delightfully strange thing to listen to this computerized music in an analog format.

It's fitting, after all, since the band's theme was how humans were increasingly combined with machines in the modern world, the biological and synthetic merging together. Autobahn was about cars, Radioactivity about radio and nuclear energy (this was the loosest one), Trans Europe Express about trains, Man-Machine the metacommentary on humans being more robotic, and Computer World, about the technology that has come to dominate life in this century. The Tour de France EP was about bicycles, perhaps the most literal symbiosis of flesh and machine. 

As we have become more and more connected to our smartphones, and we use those devices more and more to define ourselves to the world via social media, the more Kraftwerk seem like prophets of the 21st century. In case you think Kraftwerk is corny or old fashioned as I once did, I ask you to listen to these tracks and remember a musical innovator now passed.

"Autobahn" 

Like the prog rock band that they were, Kraftwerk used a whole album side for this opus, an ode to driving the highway of the kind the Beach Boys never could have imagined.

"Ohm Sweet Ohm"

There's a very strange yet compelling 1979 British art film called Radio On, and this song plays over the end of the film, and it's kind of perfect. It's a little piece of joy in a dark time for me.

"Europe Endless"

This is my favorite Kraftwerk song. It makes me sentimental for my year living in Germany where I could jump on a train and so much of Europe just seemed open to me. 

"Computer World"

This song came out in 1981, but seems to perfectly predict the connected, global world we live in today. At a time when the walls are coming up and disease stalks the earth I can almost feel sentimental for a time when a "computer world" would have been something to look forward to.