“I program my home computer, beam myself into the future.” So sang the group Kraftwerk in 1981, then already over a decade into their mission of putting the world on notice: the human race is morphing into a cybernetic hybrid of the organic and the synthetic. And at the Crosstown Theater last Saturday, the prescience of their vision over the past half century was brought home over and over again.
It seems implausible that a group so identified with “robotic pop,” so important to the history of hip hop and electronica, and so expressive of our collective technological fetishes, was conceived by two music students at Düsseldorf’s Robert Schumann Hochschule, a proper conservatory. Florian Schneider was a flutist and Ralf Hütter played organ, but they were early adopters of that now omnipresent musical machine, the synthesizer.
The rest is history, of course. Now the group, still led by Hütter (Schneider left the band in 2008 and died in 2020), rides the wave of their cybernetic vision well into the twenty-first century, having been honored with both a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And by all accounts after last week’s show, the accolades are well deserved.
The awestruck faces and comments after the performance stood in contrast with the spare stage that audience members saw upon arrival. Four stark podiums stood in a line, center stage, backed by a giant screen. Then the lights lowered and the band strolled onstage in Tron-like jumpsuits imprinted with grid lines.
That was when most of us donned our 3-D glasses. As the band began “Numbers,” columns and rows of digits tracked across the screen. The 3-D effects were subtle at first; later, the numeric grid began to undulate, and we were plunged into another dimension.
And yet the effects always complemented the stunning music. True, I did physically duck the first time the pointy antenna of a spacecraft leapt off the screen and seemed to pierce my brain, and there were other such moments, but for the most part the 3-D animations were resolutely minimalist, and all the more effective for it.
Though there were a plethora of dancing numbers, notes, shapes, and even cars on the Autobahn, not all of the projections were animated, as archival footage of models, cyclists, and other subjects from the songs danced around the players. Memphis even made a cameo, as orbital images of earth zoomed into the Mid-South, then the city’s skyline, and finally on the street in front of the Crosstown Concourse itself. Meanwhile, the onscreen action contrasted sharply with the musicians, who manned their podiums stoically. That made their every foot tap, hip shake, and trace of a smile all the more telling: they were getting into it, but subtly.
And they were really playing. While some of their movements obviously included triggering certain sound patterns, they did have keyboards. Moreover, Hütter explained to Rolling Stone why the familiar old songs sounded so fresh: “Our music is changing in time, so we always play different versions; sometimes we change the tempos and sound,” he said. “Sometimes there’s different traffic on the autobahn. It’s all real. That’s what makes it interesting. Our compositions are like minimalistic film scripts or theater scripts. We can work with this; it’s never going to be the same. It changes over the years.”
This sheds light on why even the retro-futurism of Kraftwerk’s sound and visuals felt decidedly au courant. Even as images of late-’70s-era computer consoles floated before us, the musical weave of rhythm, melody, harmony, and noise was full of funk, beauty, and the sonic detours of strange breakdowns. At the same time, the group did not dip their toes much into the territory of sampling and infinite layering so common in modern electronic music. Their minimalist approach, often boiling down to the interplay of four contrasting parts, kept their aesthetic tightly focused.
And what a powerful aesthetic they’ve created. In a sense, the band was the ultimate expression of the pop art first envisioned in the ’60s: catchy, reproducible melodies, elemental rhythms, and lyrics built on simple phrases or even single words. Yet behind the simplicity, the classical inclinations of the group’s founders shone through, as in the intriguing modulations of the basic building-block chords of “The Man-Machine,” or the elegiac fanfare of “Tour de France.”
Combining all these elements, Kraftwerk reminded us of the power of world-building, paring down the real world to its most basic elements, only to reassemble them anew. That they did so with a real historical insight and an inimitable style was clearly inspiring to both fans and musical innovators that happened to see them in action.
To mark this moment, and savor the possibilities that these masters of funk, melody and noise revealed to us, we present images captured by two of the community’s most fervent music lovers, Ron Buck and Robert Traxler.
Setlist:
Numbers / Computer World / Computer World 2
It's More Fun to Compute / Home Computer
Spacelab
Airwaves / Tango
The Man-Machine
Electric Café
Autobahn
Computer Love
The Model
Neon Lights
Geiger Counter / Radioactivity
Metropolis
Tour de France / Étape 1 / Chrono / Prologue / Étape 2
Trans Europe Express / Abzug / Metal on Metal
Encore:
The Robots / Robotronik
Planet of Visions
Pocket Calculator
Non Stop / Boing Boom Tschak / Music Non Stop 