I knew the 21st century was in full swing on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in 2013 when I watched two friends walk down the aisle to Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” and it didn’t feel weird. Some of the wedding guests reached for tissues. Others pulled out their handheld computers to snap photographs, sealing memories in pixels. The future was here and it was lovely.
Is that Kraftwerk’s real legacy? It’s tough to name a more widely influential pop group, but Kraftwerk’s impact goes even further than Afrika Bambaata, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, OutKast and every techno record ever made. Ultimately, Kraftwerk taught us that the future isn’t something to be afraid of. Where science fiction warned us of technocratic dystopias and AI run amok, these German futurists promised that our machines would enrich our lives. For starters, they could make us dance.
The group got much of its supremely funky tomorrow-vision from co-founder Florian Schneider, who died in April of cancer at 73. Schneider has been credited with naming and conceptualizing Kraftwerk, but it’s difficult to locate the personal touch he brought to the music when so many Kraftwerk songs rolled off the band’s assembly line devoid of human fingerprints.
Schneider rarely gave interviews, but when he spoke about Kraftwerk’s efforts to bridge the chasm between man and machine, his words carried the playfulness of performance art and the heft of truth. “It’s rather a more sophisticated relationship,” Schneider said in a 1978 interview cited in “,” David Buckley’s book from 2015. “The machine helps the man and the man admires the machine.” Then Schneider gestured to a Sony cassette recorder. “This is the extension of your brain.
You can hear a similar fusion of sincerity, silliness and sleaze in the lyrics of “Computer Love,” first released in 1981. “I call this number for a data date,” Kraftwerk co-pilot Ralf Hütter sings in the English version of the song, prophesying our species’s big splash into the online dating pool. Schneider wasn’t credited as a songwriter here, but as one of the song’s producers, he helped infuse its mechanical elegance with an impossible sense of intimacy.
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