It's More Fun to Compute
Kraftwerk - Musique Non Stop (1986 / Electro)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re gonna mark two years (a few weeks or so late, of course) of the internet’s greatest living news recommendation email newsletter by checking in on the most influential band of the 20th century who isn’t The Beatles.
Detroit is electro. Germany is electro.
These words appear on the screen behind Kraftwerk on their amazing 3D Tour, which I was lucky enough to be invited to last night. They’re a firm and simple reminder of the international electronic conversation between the two cultures that started in 1977 with the release of Trans-Europe Express, Kraftwerk’s blueprint for what would become electro.
In 1986, two albums came out that overturned the iceberg of my musical tastes:
Run DMC - Raising Hell & Kraftwerk - Electric Cafe
A kid I knew in small town Texas played them both for me the day he got them. We were on a playground. We were children.
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I think it’s their German-ness that makes Kraftwerk, well…work. Their pulse is mechanical, yet human as if they are indeed sentient AI analyzing the input phrase What is soul? (soul is the ring around your bathtub…).
It’s very endearing. To see some of the lyrics up on that screen in their live show is to be reminded of the absolute silly beauty of their music.
I want Kraftwerk’s vision of the future, the utopia of rhythm machines pounding out an electro-harmonious heartbeat on the joys of human achievement: bicycle endurance races, the fun of automotive motion, the wonders of numbers and crunching them with abandon on a pocket calculator…
I program my home computer Beam myself into the future
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