Kraftwerk

United States, 1975. A German electronic avant-garde band breaks into the top ten best-selling albums; the record is called “Autobahn”, and it marks the beginning of an epochal shift in pop music. Up until then, pure electronic music had mostly been synonymous with experimentation, born from research pioneers such as Edgar Varèse and John Cage, through to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Electronic pioneering took a fully realized shape within rock thanks to the contribution of names such as the American acts Silver Apples and Wendy Carlos in the '60s, before landing in the German movements of “kosmische musik” and “krautrock” at the dawn of the '70s, not forgetting the digressions brought about, for instance, by Pink Floyd within British psychedelia. In any case, before “Autobahn”, a thick wall still separated commonly understood pop-rock music from a genre that seemed destined to be relegated to the category of “music for the chosen few”.

We could say that “Trans-Europe Express” is the offspring and culmination of a constructivist project that Kraftwerk had long and lucidly planned, brought here to its fullest realization: the creation of a new language of popular music, a bold and perfect fusion of experimental codes and pop tradition, which gathered up and made accessible the lessons of the 20th century's artistic avant-gardes — futurism above all — returning them, usable by all, to every inhabitant of the planet in a new, stateless music.

The journey starts from the heart of a Mitteleuropa left mortified by the Second World War. The opening “Europe Endless” reclaims the centrality of the Mitteleuropean tradition that had been swallowed up by Anglo-Saxon cultural models: the eternal Europe, the timeless old Europe, whose civilization burned unexpectedly in the hands of its mad dictators; what would become the cliché of the years to come, thanks also to Berlin-era Bowie, finds its programmatic manifesto in this track. There's no poetry in the conventional sense in the lyrics, but a descriptive statement whose contours take shape in the icy detachment of the vocals, laid over an angelic choir of orchestron, amid the counterpoints of a vocoder that fades into an elementary yet intricate melodic harmony. In this context, the crescendo structure and the beat kept by an aseptic “four-four” time are the devices used to give the lyrics a value that goes beyond the meaning of the words themselves: generic places that magically find their place within the Western mysticism radiating from Europe's ancient avenues, in its composed elegance and in the dark allure of its decadence. An alchemy of evocations that had never had an equal and which, as we'll see, is not an isolated episode within the record.

“The young man entered the hall of mirrors, where he discovered the reflection of himself”, so begins “Hall Of Mirrors”. The dirge-like, measured rhythm, wrapped in a sinister echo, is marked by the footsteps of one who walks through the rooms of his own labyrinth, at the bottom of which he can look his own abyss in the eye, and within it, the mystery of the Other Dimension. It's the metaphor of mirrors and their deceptive games, of the age-old opposition between Being and Appearing, taking shape in the dramatic relationship between the artist and his creation, which changes and, in changing, confuses him to the point of transforming him, dragging him into the abyss of a nihilism with no apparent way out. It's also a cold acknowledgment of the fickleness and emptiness of human affairs, whose reckless materialism is swallowed up in the whirlpools of the Self: pure industrial-age esotericism, a cornerstone of the dark-wave existentialism to come. The angular, geometric structure, the heavy pace climbing over an impersonal spoken voice, working its way up a crystalline scale of synths, lend this hallucinated inner journey its unmistakable aura of solemnity.

The recurring theme is precisely that of the journey, of movement: first through the evocative temporal exploration of shared cultural roots (“Europe Endless”), then through the spiritual depths of the Ego (“Hall Of Mirrors”), and now within the depersonalizing material reality of the industrial city: “Showroom Dummies”. Mannequins come to life, watching the skeleton of the city with detachment as they dance on their own alienation, while appearance takes the place of “feeling”, at the end of a process that will consistently mark the birth of Man-Machine. A danceable rhythm, a melodic refrain that leaves you defenseless, a relentless, monotone beat: this is the definitive techno-pop track, whose variations on the theme made the fortunes of Ultravox, Gary Numan, OMD and Depeche Mode, though the list could really go on forever.

As we can see, in just 20 minutes there's more than enough to overturn all the reference points that had defined rock's artistic expression and its offshoots up until 1977; and yet, the journey destined to change the course of music for the next 25 years has not even begun.

The track “Trans Europe Express”, with its “Metal On Metal” digression, is the classic point of no return, from which the global musical movements that gave rise to techno and its thousand branches would take shape, and even to Black hip hop as we hear it today. An enchanting synthetic reproduction of a train's motion, built entirely using the “tape-loop” technique (which at the time was a matter for the select few, since samplers didn't yet exist), makes the concept of “movement” aimed at physically “covering” a distance both perfect and unsurpassed. Fourteen hypnotic minutes, with minimal but decisive variations on the theme, and a spoken phrase repeated endlessly, there to remind us that the locomotive's advance “from station to station” is nonetheless governed by man and by his heart, through lived experience and its science; but then, the clatter of metal on the rails: all of this is dance, a robotic dance that still tells us of Europe (“Rendezvous on Champs Elysées/ Leave Paris in the morning on T.E.E.”), but in the language of the avant-garde and the rhythm of funk. The arc that began with cars racing down the “Autobahn” becomes firmly lodged in the imagination of both artists and audiences, conditioning them to the point where this suite of the technological age remains, consciously or unconsciously, essential for anyone still working within electronic-based pop today.

All the magic and mystery of synthesizers are contained in the album's intimate instrumental closing section, in which the past of the German Romantic tradition of “Franz Schubert” and the eternal return to the future of “Endless Endless” ideally meet, blending into one another until they merge: the last fragments of the most human whispers a machine has ever managed to conceive.

Note: the record 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 listed in the Tracklist section.

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01/11/2006