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KRAFTWERK: THREE VIEWS OF THE MAN-MACHINE

Bussy, Pascal
Kraftwerk: Man, Machine And Music
SAF Publishing Ltd, Second Edition, 2001

Barr, Tim
Kraftwerk: With love from Dusseldorf
Ebury Press, 1998

Wolfgang Flür,
Kraftwerk: I was a Robot
Sanctuary Publishing, 2000

(Please see below if you are interested in ordering any of these titles from Amazon Books)

Kraftwerk eschewed rock stardom for an art-house ideology, and even that was cloaked in ambiguity. Kraftwerk are elusive and writing a book about them is a difficult task confined mainly to interpretations of the interviews or studies of the influence they have had on others. The books by Bussy and Barr were both handicapped by this limitation. Then there's the book by ex-Kraftwerk insider, Wolfgang Flür. One would have expected this finally to lift the lid, but it still fails to penetrate Kraftwerk's Hütter-Schneider core or bring any great new revelations.

Reading three biographies of Kraftwerk, more-or-less in parallel, is a demanding - some would say unrewarding task. Inevitably, some impressions about Kraftwerk themselves have tended to merge and these are addressed in the later sections of this review.

BUSSY

Bussy's book was originally published in 1993. I read the revised second edition published in 2001. It's a straightforward history, easy to read and frank about the practical difficulties of approaching its subject.

Influenced by Stockhausen and ultimately by Italian Futurism, Kraftwerk was an expression of avant-garde artiness at first through free improvisation and only later through electronic minimalism in the context of 'pop'. They admired the Beach Boys and strove to imitate what the latter had done for America in the "conceptualising of a German lifestyle". They also admired David Bowie, an admiration that was reciprocated although they never finally got to work together.

A carefully constructed image and lifestyle made them the very antithesis of rock stars, except, apparently, when it came to girls whom they chased assiduously. A retro-futuristic image ("modernity and nostalgia") reflected an essential ambiguity towards technology, an ambiguity paralleled by a strong sense of irony completely lost on their American interviewers. They gave birth to synth-pop, industrial, ambient and dance. And they passed from history into myth.

BARR

Barr's book gives the immediate impression of being woven around Kraftwerk rather than being focused on the group itself. Barr takes a cultural studies approach, aiming to place Kraftwerk in a cultural, social and even political context, but the attempt is combined with wild and crass assertions, and the over-the-top rhetoric of pop journalism which seems out of place in a book:

"At the centre of their drive to be more than just a pop group, is their obvious affinity with the most radical and iconoclastic currents in music...art...and politics (liberal socialism)."

I don't know (or care) whether Kraftwerk were or are adherents of "liberal socialism" or not, but an "obvious affinity" does not spring to mind. And does Barr seriously believe that "liberal socialism" is a radical and iconoclastic political current, or is the whole passage just sloppy journalistic hyperbole?

That Punk broke the hold of the 'rock-dinosaurs', opening a door for Kraftwerk and the ensuing synth-pop revolution, is significant, as is Kraftwerk's prediction in Computer World of the rise of personal computers. But the level of detail given to the Bill Grundy-Sex Pistols TV interview and the growth of IBM seems somewhat tangential. Perhaps Barr has a bank of literary samples on his PC which he can drag-and-drop to provide the fills in any work of pop journalism. In spite of all this, Barr is an experienced music journalist and I did find myself warming to this book as I progressed through it.

FLUR

For the greater part of its history, and certainly during the most important part of that history, Kraftwerk consisted of four people: Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür. As the main architect of Kraftwerk's image, this was the impression that Ralf Hütter was happy to project, but the reality was not quite as it seemed. Hütter and Schneider were the core members with proprietorial control, while Flür and Bartos were employees. With the development of sequencers, of which Kraftwerk were leading exponents, the drumming talents of Flür and Bartos became more and more redundant, and they both eventually parted company from the group. But if Hütter and Schneider had the control and most of the money, Wolfgang and Karl seem to have got the girls. (Emil Schult was a sort of fifth, hidden, member of Kraftwerk, but that is another story).

Wolfgang Flür's book is not just about Kraftwerk - it's an autobiography - and it traces his sexual promiscuity and his role as a quintessential teenage rebel. It's a very personal biography full of strange psycho-sexual confessions, anecdotes and fantasies. It's also something of Bildungsroman, tracing Wolfgang's quest to free himself first from his unfeeling and disparaging father and then from his unfeeling bosses in Kraftwerk. The wounds are deep, and the book opens with the cosmic psycho-babble of aftershock. These bruised feelings are understandable but their public exposure is not entirely manly or dignified. Flür's book is also a big advertisement for his Time Pie by his new group, Yamo, which I found very disappointing.

Wolfgang depicts Ralf as being rather stiff, explicitly describes him as inflexible, and ultimately strongly suggests that he is robotic, finally assuming the roboticism he had designed and projected for the Kraftwerk image. In contrast, Flür depicts himself as human - all too human - and is keen to demonstrate his feminine side, social conscience and PC credentials. Florian Schneider and Karl Bartos remain little more than two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, except for the episode when stress got the better of Florian. There is also little that can easily be understood about Kraftwerk's technology, and virtually nothing about the process of composition and production, although, in fairness, it has been suggested that this may be as a result of the injunction taken out against him by Hütter/Schneider.

PERFECTION AND PRIVACY

The Bussy and Barr books both fairly well trace Kraftwerk's development from avant-garde to pop and on to the re-absorption of trends they had set in motion. They both tend to reinforce the public assumption of Hütter's/Schneider's obsessions with both perfection and privacy, an obsession which in later years has centred on cycling rather than music. This is no coincidence. Serious cycling is a very obsessional, and indeed, technical interest, and one of the ultimate realisations of the 'man-machine'. (Even one of our own reviewers has fallen into this fascination!)

The obsession with privacy seems to have been born mainly from a natural shyness, but dovetailed conveniently with the Kraftwerk ideology that they were not rockstars but workers in a factory. The factory concept had been pioneered by Andy Warhol who had returned to the Renaissance concept of being the artistic director of a group of craftsmen. In Kraftwerk's case, the craftsmen were machines.

IDEOLOGISTS

Kraftwerk may never have issued a manifesto, but they have always been 'art ideologists'. One of their favourite games has been to play with ambiguity. Radio activity (i.e. broadcasting) was conflated with radio-activity (radiation). The imagery of Fascism was conflated with the related imagery of contemporary Constructivism. Dummies were conflated with robots and also with workers (Russian robotnik = worker). Above all, their approach to technology itself has always been highly ambiguous. Another theme which they have played with, particularly on album covers, has been 'retro-futurism', a concept that underlines an identification with the historical continuum rather than the pure futurism with which most people probably associated them.

I have written about Kraftwerk in the past tense, because it is unlikely that they will ever rise to the same heights again. They spawned a revolution that filled the world with competitors, and the world has moved on. Perhaps we should stop speculating about their next album and leave them to enjoy their place in history.

If you're a Kraftwerk worshipper like me you'll want all three books, but if your interest is more limited I'd recommend Bussy's.

Rik - 15 February 2002

ORDER THESE TITLES FROM AMAZON BOOKS

Bussy, Pascal Kraftwerk: Man, Machine And Music
Barr, Tim Kraftwerk: With love from Dusseldorf	O/P	O/P
Wolfgang Flür, Kraftwerk: I was a Robot

KRAFTWERK-RELATED LINKS (INTERNAL)