Kraftwerk is one of the most influential bands to today’s new wave of music. Their experimental approach to music and use of new mechanical instruments, in place of traditional ones, has been a catalyst for many styles of music to flourish and has helped transformed others into what we know today. If you turn on your radio to the top 40’s chart, you will instantly hear sounds that were initially pioneered by Kraftwerk such as synthesizers, sequencers, and vocal transformers, just to name a few.
Two students of the Dusseldorf Conservator, Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider formed Kraftwerk[1]. At first, they were attempting to imitate the pop sound of The Beach Boys, but after initially being unsuccessful, the two young musicians built their own studio and began working on more experimental music using mechanically created sounds. Their first two albums have been described as being Krautrock, a form of experimental pop; however, their fourth album Autobahn was something completely different and had a sound that hadn’t been heard before[2]. It was on this album that the band had completely removed all forms of traditional instrumentation and was purely creating music through the use of machines.
Kraftwerk also had an image that wasn’t a standard for a pop or rock artist of the time. They played shows dressed in vintage suits with short, neatly cut hair, and enjoyed bicycling in their free time rather than partying and running wild. This image was in part due to their background of growing up in Germany and also in part to their idea of acting out their music and simulating robots, as if they were one with the instruments that they had created.
One of the attributes that helped Kraftwerk to become so successful was how they were able to conceptualize entire albums based on a single theme. Autobahn was obviously themed towards motor vehicle travel and the voyage. Their next album, Radio Activity was not an international hit like Autobahn had been, but they still continued to have a theme in their art. Radio Activity however, was a success in Europe and allowed the band to travel the area playing shows and subsequently finding the theme for their next album, Trans-Europe Express, which was a tribute to locomotion. The two albums released in 1978, Man Machine, and 1981, Computer World, showed a shift in the themes to go from something human such as communication and travel to something very non-human in that of technology[3].
Kraftwerk is responsible for not only many innovations, but also influencing the right people to make this electronic form of music more widely popular. The very nature of their robotic, repetitive, yet funky sound was an innovation. In a way it is similar to what The Beatles were experimenting with songs like Tomorrow Never Knows, where the tracks could go on forever and somehow never get old. They also were innovators technologically, creating and using many instruments for the very first time. However, one of their biggest achievements may be the influence that they had on huge names of the time such as Brian Eno and David Bowie. They helped open up a much wider audience for this style of music and helped shape a worldwide love affair with electronic music.
When I listen to Kraftwerk I can definitely hear the way that they have influenced pop music. You can’t turn on the radio anymore without hearing a song that has auto-tune on it, which is basically a form of a vocoder. Electronic drum kits and processed synthesizers are also very common in today’s most popular music.
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