Opinion | Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider Wasn’t All for Technology


Opinion | Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider Wasn't All for Technology

As pioneers of synthesized pop music, the German group Kraftwerk has long been hailed as visionary. But the band, whose co-founder Florian Schneider died last month, has been visionary on a much grander scale than music.

While the members of Kraftwerk have famously celebrated technology — perhaps more than any other group in the history of popular music — they have also been wary of it. Their elliptical, dystopian “Computer World (1981), for instance, didn’t just anticipate the ubiquity of the “home computer,” it described a society in which digital technology infiltrated every aspect of life. It wasn’t a celebration, it was a warning.

Kraftwerk was formed in 1970 in Düsseldorf by Mr. Schneider and a fellow music school student, Ralf Hütter. Both of their fathers were well off and that meant the band could afford state-of-the-art equipment, which might well have pushed them in the futuristic direction they took.

While so much of mainstream ’70s rock — and the granola-crazed popular culture of the time in general — was about going up the country, Kraftwerk insisted on acknowledging technology. The band’s synthetic sounds, automated rhythms and severe haircuts were a pointed contrast with the prevailing hirsute, earth-toned boogie of much rock music of the time, just as the group’s rigorously Teutonic mien was a reaction to the hegemony of American culture in postwar Germany. Kraftwerk wanted to create its own culture. As Mr. Hütter said, “The question is, ‘What does Germany sound like today?’ That’s where we started.”

But Kraftwerk has never been just some novelty group whose members pretend to be robots. There is soul and beauty in their music, and both humor and melancholy. It’s not surprising that they have a social conscience.

Nuclear contamination is a byproduct of humankind’s inability to completely control the effects of its interactions with the physical world. In our relentless, reckless quest to produce more energy so we can produce more profit, we are interfering with nature, with effects that we can’t fully anticipate — often with catastrophic consequences, as with potentially apocalyptic climate breakdown.

Composed with the Belgian composer-engineer Dan Lacksman, the song, the haunting “Stop Plastic Pollution” includes percussive samples of water dripping from a faucet. It is ingeniously spare and mechanistically funky in that Kraftwerkian way, with delicious textures and a catchy little hook. Mr. Schneider delivers the lyrics in a conspiratorial whisper: “Stop plastic pollution in the ocean/Save the fish/Keep your planet clean.”




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