Monday, May 10, 2010

PROTO GEEK COOL


Oooh yeah, Kraftwerk. The band that always had your rock-only friends scratching there heads ("you like this shit?"). Say what you will, no one has been able to fully replicate their sound: German, mechanical, synthetic and oddly soothing. It's hard to say when they first became acceptably "cool." Back in 1974, when a severely edited "Autobahn" was played on FM stations, stoners and proto-geeks delighted. A few years later, when Bowie and Iggy were recording in Berlin, they were gushing all over them. Bowie went as far as naming a song after Florian Schneider, one of Kraftwerk's co-founders ("V2 Schneider"). Then there was Afrika Bambaataa sampling them in "Planet Rock," an early rap milestone. (It pretty much started the whole "where the fuck did they get that?" brand of unlikely samples). And there's one somewhat refreshing reason to like them: they're not fame whores. They do what they do, exceedingly well, without excessive flash. They pretty much keep their mouths shut and let everybody else try to make sense of it. Those smart passive-marketing Germans...

I came across a handful of videos on Mojo's site, and, if you're into Kraftwerk, a couple of them are noteworthy. There's an early one ("Tanzmusic") when the were still using regular instruments (Florian on flute!), yet still sound like Kraftwerk (pretty amazing how contemporary even that sounds). There's a clip from Top of the Pops, of them playing "Autobahn" (with some slightly annoying voice-over narration). But the humdinger in my book, is just a short part of the "Showroom Dummies" video. Are you ready for this? At 2:07, it's 24 seconds of...Kraftwerk dancing! It's fucking hilarious, had me in stitches, all ten times I watched it. It's some sort of constrained "running man" dance. While they may have been trying to dance like machines, all I could think of was "Wow, they even invented bad dancing."

Kraftwerk's Greatest Clips at Mojo Magazine's site

Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express mp3 at Loft and Lost
Kraftwerk (early) - Ruckzuck mp3 at The Walrus (+ two Neu!)
Kraftwerk - Man Machine mp3 at Golden Bloggen
Kraftwerk - Radioactivity mp3 at KinoSport
Kraftwerk's Official site
List of sampled Kraftwerk cuts at The Kraftwerk Influence
I Believe the Truth is Out There, another fan site

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