Kraftwerk
Autobahn
★★★★★
PARLOPHONE
1975 in the Motor City, and Lester Bangs is unsuccessfully hassling Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider to pose for photographs by a Detroit freeway. Soon enough, Kraftwerk will create a fully-automated music, a sound local Michigan producers will streamline even further into techno. For now, though, their replacement by robots is a distant fantasy, and the advent of music entirely generated by AI even more remote. The journalist, not Kraftwerk, is the one who seems most invested in an idea of electronic music where flesh and blood artists are rendered obsolete.
In a piece which eventually appears in both Creem and NME, Bangs pontificates at length about the imminence of our machine overlords and “The Cybernetic Inevitable”. “What's to stop the machines,” he asks, “from eventually taking over?”
"It's like a car," Florian Schneider explains to him. "You have the control, but it's your decision how much you want to control it. If you let the wheel go, the car will drive somewhere, maybe off the road.”
Just over 50 years on from its release in November 1974, Kraftwerk’s fourth album, Autobahn, is routinely identified as a historical inflection point, its title track the first electronic pop song to cruise serenely into the American Top 30. But listening back to this beautiful record now, even in a high-spec new Dolby Atmos Mix, it’s the human fallibility and control at the heart of Autobahn, the vestiges of an older musical world transitioning into a new one, that’s most striking.
For most of those five decades, Kraftwerk have more or less disowned the three albums that preceded Autobahn as “archaeology”, blocking legal reissues and keeping them off streaming services. The improvisational, unruly spirit of Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2 and Ralf Und Florian is certainly at odds with the mature band’s discipline - technocrats, after all, don’t normally indulge in flute jams.
Still, as early as 1970, that self-titled first album begins with Ruckzuck, and what Julian Cope in Krautrocksampler nails as an “opening eternal synthesizer chord peculiarly like a garage version of the Autobahn beginning”. Ruckzuck is a bumpy, varispeed ride instead of a frictionless one, and whenever Hütter and Schneider get close to melodic classicism on those early records – 1973’s Elektrisches Roulette, for instance – there’s usually an avant-garde obligation to sabotage it. By 1972, their old bandmates Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger had released the first Neu! album, paring down their sound to a linear motorik pulse on Hallogallo. And by early 1974, as Kraftwerk started work on Autobahn in their Düsseldorf studio, Rother had teamed up with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius in Harmonia, upgrading the old implements of guitar, bass and drums with a new arsenal of synthesisers.
Autobahn wasn’t quite without precedent, then, and it didn’t sound exactly like the future, either. The first thing you hear on the title track is a human intervention, a driver climbing into the machine, slamming the door and putting a key in the ignition. The car is not a futuristic prototype, more likely one designed nearly 30 years earlier; Hütter’s Volkswagen Beetle. The journey navigates the “Weiße Streifen, grüner Rand” (White stripes, green edge) of the A555 towards producer Conny Plank’s studio in Wolperath, near Cologne; a motorway completed in 1932, six months before Hitler came to power in Germany. Autobahn is, if anything, retro-futuristic, not least when the deadpan vocals echo The Beach Boys of the early ’60s at their preppiest.
The next 22 minutes and 46 seconds are packed with incident. Autobahn rhapsodises the banality of driving as a transcendent experience, but there are changes of speed, different terrains and regions to traverse, and a regular reminder – in those quavering harmonies – that an unpredictable creature has their hands on the wheel. Around nine and a half minutes in, the trip runs into jeopardy, with hazardous overtaking manoeuvres and anxious horn parps. “We have done electronic accidents,” Schneider told Lester Bangs in 1975, alluding to how chance still had a role to play in Kraftwerk’s music.
That becomes more evident on the electro-acoustic Side Two of Autobahn, often neglected in the wake of the extraordinary title track. Kometenmelodie 1 (Comet Melody) and Mitternacht (Midnight) are ominous, sepulchral, the sound of keen experimenters learning how to create atmospherics with Minimoog, EMS Synthi and ARP Odyssey, and decent trial runs for the next Kraftwerk album, Radio-Activity. Morgenspaziergang (Morning Walk) is weirdly enchanted, with a fluttering recorder melody and glitchy electro-birdsong that suggests a Karlheinz Stockhausen pastorale. But Kometenmelodie 2, its lush refrain an electronic retooling of the 19th century classical tradition, is as good an indication of where Kraftwerk are heading as Autobahn itself – toward a romantic, stainless future, to Europe Endless, The Robots, Spacelab and beyond.
This latest iteration of Autobahn does not, of course, have any extra tracks – just Hütter’s new Dolby Atmos Mix for the Blu-ray, and a vinyl picture disc that uses the 2009 remaster. No demos, alternate takes or lost songs have made it out of their Kling Klang studio; Kraftwerk might not have been entirely infallible in 1974, but they’ve done everything to make it look as if they were since. More than ever, though, it sounds like a bridge between the eccentricities of early Kraftwerk and the perfect Mensch-Maschine they became.
The three-minute single edit of Autobahn started a musical revolution, but perhaps it wasn’t the shock of the new that originally propelled it to success in the States. For all the track’s subsequent influence, Autobahn was ostensibly a ’70s novelty hit like Convoy or Disco Duck, with its strange Mitteleuropean othering of rock’n’roll’s car and freeway fetish, its arch Beach Boys pastiche. Kraftwerk had made their first masterpiece, and would soon evolve into the most sophisticated and radio-friendly of electropop groups. But to date, they’ve never have another hit single in the US.
Autobahn 50th Anniversary Edition is out not on Parlophone.
Buy: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
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