138. Spacelab

Kraftwerk: The Man·Machine (Kling Klang/EMI, 1978);
composed by Ralf Hütter & Karl Bartos

My favorite story about Kraftwerk is Tina Weymouth’s anecdote about meeting Ralf Hütter and trying to break the ice by complimenting Kraftwerk’s lyrics, only to have him snap, “What?! The lyrics are stupid!” This self-assessment is basically accurate, but Kraftwerk’s lyrics are a very peculiar kind of stupid – as is this group’s overall aesthetic of human beings looking and behaving as much like automatons as possible and playing what they conceptualize as music that only machines would enjoy let alone make. The irony is that once they abandoned what they had in common with other motorik German groups that favored repetition like Neu! (an early Kraftwerk offshoot) and turning their mechanized sound and imagery into a Constructivist cartoon, they started making very singular and strangely emotional pop music out of it. This track has no lyrics other than the title, repeated through a vocoder, interspersed with a melancholy Schubertian theme, against the same kind of synthesized bottom that activated Giorgio Moroder’s production of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” but harder, more angular, and more unrelenting. The resulting effect is strangely soft and beautiful, just as contemporary extruded disco mixes began opening up emotional territory that songs themselves could not touch.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.