Kraftwerk

Welcome to the machine. At the end of a long journey, begun at the gates of a distinctly Teutonic Cosmos and continued along the pristine futurist motorways of “Autobahn” and the creaking rails of “Trans-Europe Express” — where they happened to run into Iggy Pop and David Bowie — Kraftwerk arrive at the (perhaps) definitive stage of their career: the one in the presence of Man-Machine. A total, illuminating symbiosis. Old Mitteleuropa hurled into a Metropolis dazzled by neon lights and populated by unsettling robots, giant computers and spaceships out for a spin. Musically, it's the crowning achievement of the machines' revolution against thirty years of rock tradition: farewell to the blues, to the sacred trinity of "bass-guitar-drums", all power to the new humanoids armed with vocoders, synthesizers and drum machines. Much to the dismay of those who would never surrender to the shift, starting with Rolling Stone, which in its first review of “Autobahn” asked: “It's good, but is it rock?”. Today, with little of rock left standing, the doubt seems almost quaint, but at the time it laid the ideal groundwork for the searing generational rift that would brand the entire following decade: the eternally misunderstood Eighties.

The perfect pop song

But Kraftwerk, who had been a decade ahead of their time since birth, could hardly worry about that. Their goal, if anything, was to adapt those futuristic sounds to human needs: “To write the perfect pop song for all the tribes of the global village”, in the immodest words of Florian Schneider, leading operations alongside Ralf Hütter, Wolfgang Flür and, here for the first time, Karl Bartos. All of them equipped with stacks of vintage Mini Moogs and ARP Odysseys.

Goal achieved in no time at all, thanks to the eternal riff of “The Model”: “A melody of such astonishing flexibility that it lent itself to being reinterpreted by Snakefinger, as well as by Big Black and the Balanescu Quartet”, as Eddy Cilia recalls in our monograph. Classic in its adherence to the song format, it actually dismantles some of its certainties, starting with the chorus, effectively supplanted by that dazzling keyboard solo that kicks in at 1'49'' and never fails to leave you breathless. It would become the paradigm of modern, stateless synth-pop, the true Esperanto of the global village. But its lyrics, co-written with Emil Schult, are also striking: the pungent portrait of a preened, affected diva who drinks only champagne and changes her mind with every camera flash (“It only takes a camera to change her mind”). Far from wanting to be misogynistic, Kraftwerk issue a romantic appeal to distinguish beauty from the pornographic use made of it in consumer society: “Much of the music around us is garbage, sharing the same values as pornography. It's these values that turn The Model into a robot. Is there music beyond pornography? That's the question we're asking”, explained Hütter. Fashion, thus, goes from a frivolous circus of vanity to a bastion of twentieth-century culture and manners, a life model worth preserving.

Old Europe in neon

Yet these twilit aromas of Old Europe also survive beneath the artificial glow of "Neon Lights," a snapshot of a romantic, nostalgia-laden Düsseldorf, where one can still find shelter at the Hotel Cristallo, at Frau Klofter's, or in some decadent nightclub (according to the visuals that would accompany live performances of the song over the years). A small, ancient-yet-modern world, destined to be threatened by the robotic age: here the archetypal osmosis of man and machine sublimates into a new symbiosis and is even overturned, transmuting into the "machine man," the machine that completes the work by taking the place of its creator. The icy mantra of the title track is built on pentatonic chord scales and grows in intensity with a synth phrase repeated throughout, and a cyborg voice intoning "Man-machine super human being," until the song's title is repeated 8 times, climbing through the octaves, in a style that critic Simon Reynolds would later call "android doo-wop."

But what might look like a horrifying premonition of all the nightmares to come in new wave is in fact merely the fruit of a calm, progressive weltanschauung: "The Man Machine is an attempt to discover the parallels, the affinities, the friendship between man and machine," Hütter theorized. "It's the opposite of what rock culture did in the '60s, which tried to react against an era and break away from it. We believe strongly in this pursuit. It's our everyday experience, the discovery of man-machine: to show that it isn't a limitation, that we do mechanical things while machines do the most human things imaginable. We approached them the way children discover life: we realized they are the psychological reflection of our existence. So here is the rejection of last century's theories (man dominated by the machine) and a calm, friendly collaboration between man and machine."

Android Dances

It was, in short, the Western world entrusting its future to droids as efficient as calculators and as reassuring as the good-natured C1-P8 from "Star Wars." Or like the protagonists of the hypnotic, Asimov-esque "The Robots," who greet us amicably in Russian, pledging their loyalty ("Ya tvoy sluga," "I am your servant") and unconditional devotion ("Ya tvoi rabotnik," "I am your worker"). Yet those starched mannequins in red and black — with waxy pale faces, lipstick on thin lips, and hair styled uniformly like Big Jim dolls — are unsettling, now as then. Even though, deep down, they closely resemble the famous effigies of the four Kraftwerk members in their regulation red shirts and black bow ties depicted on the album's memorable cover, inspired by Russian constructivist El Lissitzky. And ultimately, if we strip away its synthetic veneer, "The Robots" is nothing more than an intensely human dance, marked out to the industrial rhythm of machines. Because, after all, "machines are funky" (Hütter dixit).

Rounding out this red-and-black sci-fi fairy tale are two (semi-)instrumentals. The first, "Spacelab," is a masterpiece, suspended between a mechanized disco drive worthy of Moroder and a pastoral melodic sweep worthy of the Classical tradition: only a vocoder pronounces the title, wrapped in a shimmering blanket of synthesizers winding sinuously along, ideally accompanying the spaceship's long sidereal voyage, complete with its naive "Space: 1999"-style sci-fi iconography (promptly recycled in all subsequent live stage designs). It remains the band's only, moving cosmic ode, conceived precisely at a historical moment when, due to the economic crisis, the Russians and Americans had drastically scaled back space flights, focusing instead on building laboratories in Space.

"Metropolis," on the other hand, is an unmistakable homage to the film of the same name by Fritz Lang and its city of the future, with cosmic synths over a four-on-the-floor beat prophesying Detroit techno.

The definitive manifesto of the Kraftwerk-branded sound that would bear fruit in the most disparate fields (from the synth-pop of Depeche Mode, OMD, Human League & co. to the hip-hop of Afrika Bambaataa, from dance to its house and techno offshoots all the way to the cyber-parties of Daft Punk), "The Man-Machine" is the final triumph of the pop turn inaugurated with "Autobahn": a slap in the face to every obtuse reactionary of every era who failed to grasp (and still fail to grasp) its revolutionary scope. Six songs across 36 minutes in total, which remain a treatise on the history of keyboards, with the fairy-tale grace and relentless pulse of their retrofuturist sounds — the most human whispers a machine has ever managed to conceive, whatever Rolling Stone still thought at the time, when Mitchell Schneider wrote in his contemporary review: "After about 3 minutes of listening to The Man Machine, the band has scientifically drained all the blood from the listener and replaced it with Lysol." Evocative, but false.

The cybernetic epic of the following "Computer World" would be its legitimate heir. After that, it would be the live dimension that prevailed above all. From the knobs and vintage transistors of the Kling-Klang Studios to the final frontier of techno-pop, the Düsseldorf Power Plant will always stay switched on, its energy renewable for every era and every generation.

Note: the album was released in Germany sung in German and in the rest of the world sung in English. For convenience, this review uses the titles from the international version, while the original German titles are also given in the Tracklist section.

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29/12/2019