‘Autobahn’, the album by pioneers Kraftwerk that inaugurated the era of electronic pop, turns 50 | Culture

It was with his fourth album, Autobahnin 1974, when the German band Kraftwerk found their holy grail. With a boldness that baffled critics of the time, they placed synthesizers and drum machines at the center of their compositions. That album, which is 50 years old, was the seed of something new: in its songs they distilled a synthetic, robotic and minimalist sound; something that was cold and at the same time intensely evocative. Autobahn had inaugurated the era of electronic pop.

Their sound, consolidated in the following albums with songs like The Model, The Robots and Computer Love, It paved the way for the emergence of great British techno-pop bands such as Depeche Mode, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) and Human League in the 1980s, and it continues to beat until today on Coldplay songs and in the staging of Daft Punk, among many others. The group, which after the death of Florian Schneider continues to be active with Ralf Hütter as captain, continues to cultivate its enigmatic aura, with very few interviews and the usual distance from its fans.

“Kraftwerk are the most important group in the history of popular music in the last almost 60 years,” wrote Andy McCluskey, singer of OMD, in the British magazine NME last September. He heard Autobahn at 16 and it changed his life: “That was the future.”

What did this new music evoke? Industrial soundscapes in futuristic environments to the rhythm of technological progress. The song that gave the album its name, Autobahn (highway, in German), lasting almost 23 minutes, was intended to suggest the pleasure of driving on Germany’s efficient motorways, one of the country’s great prides.

His proposal, however, was not very convincing. “The critics were lukewarm,” recalls the veteran German music journalist Jan Reetze, who has just published the essay Die Geschichte von Kraftwerks Autobahn (The Story of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn), in which he analyzes the album from musical, cultural and technical perspectives.

“It was something new, and rock music critics pointed out that it worked well and that Kraftwerk had made a big leap compared to their previous albums, but they didn’t quite know where to place it. This wasn’t rock music anymore, but it wasn’t serious music, like Stockhausen or Ligeti, either,” Reetze tells EL PAÍS from his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA).

Guided by the experience of producer and sound engineer Conny Plank, the approach of the album was technically disruptive: “Autobahn It was the first pop album that used electronics, especially the Minimoog synthesizer, as the defining element for an entire album,” he summarizes.

Classifying the group was not easy either. The band’s founders, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, from Düsseldorf in the Ruhr area, saw themselves as a kind of alchemists who used the latest technology to create new sounds. With the addition of Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos shortly afterwards, they completed the original quartet that would come to be dubbed the “Beatles of electronica.”.

They combined a self-absorbed staging, with the four performers playing their keyboards like technicians in a laboratory. “From the beginning they saw themselves not so much as a band in use, but as a kind of multimedia art project,” Reetze suggests, a sort of general art workor a total work of art with Wagnerian roots, which combined music with design and the performing arts. They also cultivated a distant image: “They made themselves inaccessible to both fans and the press; they put the joint project first and rejected personal stardom.”

Unexpectedly, the disc Autobahn It was a huge hit in the US. “It was a fluke,” Reetze says; “nobody could have predicted it.” “It was mainly college radio stations that discovered the album and played it all the time; students loved it and ordered it by mail (local record stores usually didn’t carry it).”

The Autobahn melody was meant to emulate a long motorway journey. “It is basically a description of a car journey from Düsseldorf to Hamburg,” Wolfgang Flür summarised, as quoted in the essay. Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germanyby Uwe Schütte, published in 2020: “If you know the route, you will recognise the sounds: the mechanical sounds represent the industry of the Ruhr Valley, the conveyor belts of the mining towns of Bottrop and Castrop-Rauxel. Then you have the strip through the rural area of ​​Münsterland, where the countryside is symbolised by the flute and the song gives a completely different feeling. In short: Volkswagen and Daimler, Thyssen and Krupp, beautiful landscapes, and in between the long, winding road autobahna classic German tale of our time.”

Their transatlantic success was perhaps helped by one of those curious misunderstandings in the understanding of the songs. While the original lyrics recited “Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n auf der Autobahn” (we drive on the highway), in English they sounded very similar to “We have fun, fun fun on the Autobahn” (we have fun on the highway). It seems that somehow this similarity connected the band with the Beach Boys and their song Fun, fun, fun“Of course, this is nonsense, but there was not a single article in the American press that did not mention it,” says Reetze.

“The success on college radio was enough to push the album to number five on the Billboard album charts,” Reetze recalls. The record company then shortened the track from 22:40 to three and a half minutes, and it was also a hit on the singles charts: 23 in the Top 40. In the US, Kraftwerk found a very receptive audience and even went on a 40-date tour.

That unexpected goal opened the doors to the United Kingdom, where their music, with albums such as Trans Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978) and Computer World (1981), inspired a new generation of young groups that would become world leaders in electronic music.

“His greatest influence, I think, was in the second half of the seventies and eighties. new wave and the UK New Romantics, with bands like Depeche Mode, OMD and New Order, among others, could not have been what they were without Kraftwerk; even a band like ABBA has Kraftwerk influences,” Reetze lists.

Their success is also attributed to a more earthy approach than other contemporary groups making electronic music. “While Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and most of the Berlin school were creating very meditative and abstract cosmic music, Kraftwerk developed a kind of narrative that everyone could connect with,” Reetze notes. Their “factory folk music” fascinated pops like Brian Eno and David Bowie, who dedicated a song to Schneider.

In the US, Kraftwerk’s footprint is more indirect.Autobahn “It was a hit, but that was it,” Reetze says. However, in 1977 the Trans Europe-Express album was very well received by DJs in Chicago, Detroit and New York, who used it for their mixes. “That’s where you can find traces of Kraftwerk, in today’s house and hip-hop,” he explains.

Half a century later, Kraftwerk, now without Florian Schneider, who passed away in 2020, continues to incorporate the latest advances in musical creation. “They have always tried to be at the forefront of technology, and they adapt their repertoire to it. If you go to a Kraftwerk concert today, it is surprising how fresh songs from 50 years ago sound, like Autobahnwhich is still one of his central themes,” Reetze stresses.

That album from half a century ago started a movement that shook up pop. Schütte sums up its impact as follows: “As we know today, Autobahn would end up changing the course of popular music in the 20th century forever.”