Last week, the Overton Park Shell hosted a remarkable show by the band Kraftwerk as part of its Shell Yeah! benefit concert series. The group has long been hailed as pioneers of electronic dance music, but, more than that, as world-building conceptual artists in their unyielding pursuit of a vision. That vision was on full display last Tuesday, and clearly touched a wide swath of the Memphis music community, who had turned out in force. “I think everyone I’ve ever met in Midtown is at this Kraftwerk concert right now,” quipped one music fan on social media. “It’s like a family reunion with synthesizers.”
Yet, while there was much moving and grooving in front of the Shell stage, there was a disappointing lack of the very style of dance that the German synthesists have doggedly promoted throughout their career, even in their choice of a band name. Of course, I’m talking about Twerking.
As with much music aimed at a popular dance, from the Twist to the Pony, it’s difficult to say if Kraftwerk actually invented twerking or were merely inspired by what they saw in the discotheques of 1970s Düsseldorf. But the dance has been associated with them ever since they celebrated it in their very name, which was originally rendered as KRAF-Twerk.
Founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider soon found that name either too obvious or too obscure, depending on the source, and quickly settled on the simpler spelling. But early demos, unreleased at the time, have made it clear that KRAF was an acronym denoting “Kinetic, Repetitive Ass Flexing.”
On the demo, an unused track titled “Twerk-Tanz Automatisch” from the Autobahn sessions, thus far only available on bootlegs, a voice intones, with deep gravitas, first the words “Mit gebeugten Knien tanzen” (dance with bent knees), then “das Gesäß betonend!” (emphasizing the buttocks!), before initiating a vocoder-steeped chant in English of “Kinetic! Repetitive! Ass! Flexing!”
Clearly the group was onto something, and the video above, from Detroit circa 1981, reveals how their trademark dance craze was soon being adopted internationally.
And it still is overwhelmingly popular in Germany and across the world to this day, as seen in this video with nearly 848.5 million views:
Yet there was little evidence of twerking at Kraftwerk’s triumphant Shell appearance. That’s not say it wasn’t going on at all, however. The dance is fully incorporated into the band’s method, just as surely as cycling, programming, and 3D projections. As Hütter himself revealed in a rare interview with Der Spiegel, “Diese Tanzmethode ist entscheidend für unsere künstlerische Praxis” (This dance method is crucial to our artistic practice). “Wir twerken immer still hinter unseren Podien” (We’re always twerking silently behind our podiums).
Visit this link on the Overton Park Shell website to learn about future concerts in the Shell Yeah! benefit concert series.