#I think we would benefit from more portrayals that framed trans people as just another human

[maplesyrupbloodfeud]

The ending of You made me feel better about myself but absolutely want to vomit about the state of the world. Good job for the horror genre? I guess?

[passionate-reply]

Kraftwerk are best known for being innovative pioneers in the field of electronic music, but by 1981, the rest of the world was finally catching up to them. Faced with living in the future they’d helped create, they released their last truly great album, Computer World, as a sort of reaction to the times. Find out more in my video, or by reading the transcript below the break.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums. Today, we’re talking about Kraftwerk, and what is perhaps their last truly “great” release: 1981’s Computer World.

Kraftwerk were, of course, one of the first groups to popularize the creation of music through chiefly electronic means. From their icy and robotic onstage demeanour to their stiff-shirted sense of style, just one look at them makes it clear the outsized influence that Kraftwerk have had on the genre we now think of as “electronic music.” While, at times, their significance can be over-emphasized, and I’ve always been critical of the way that the discourse on this all-male quartet has often squeezed out even earlier electronic pioneers like Wendy Carlos and Delia Derbyshire, it isn’t all for no reason. While Kraftwerk’s actual music often comes across as more accessible than experimental, the fact that they were doing it in the 1970s, long before synthesisers became a commonplace sight in popular music, should fill anyone with the sense that they were architects of the future.

Music: “The Model”

While “The Model” first debuted on Kraftwerk’s 1978 LP The Man-Machine, it was re-released as a single in 1981, where it saw substantial success in the charts. In those few short years, the musical landscape had changed, with younger artists like Gary Numan and OMD making headway in the charts with similarly synthesiser-centered songwriting. For almost the entirety of the 1970s, Kraftwerk had been contentedly putting along, secure in the knowledge that they represented the future of music. But now, as the 80s began, they were finally living in the world that they had made possible. The future had arrived for them--so what were they possibly going to do now? I think the best way to frame Computer World, and perhaps what makes it such an interesting album for me, is that it represents a reaction to the ways that the landscape of electronic music had shifted around the artists in these intervening years. On Computer World, Kraftwerk would both reflect as well as critique what younger artists inspired by them had started doing. It’s the first Kraftwerk album that seems to represent a true challenge being posed to these by now august and illustrious pioneers, forcing them to respond in new ways.

Music: “Pocket Calculator”

In many ways, “The Model” is a pop song--compared to most previous Kraftwerk compositions, it’s heavy on lyrics, and focused, surprisingly, on a human being, and a love story involving her. But I think the Computer World single “Pocket Calculator” is almost as good of a pop song as “The Model” is. Highly melodic, and almost candy-coated in its simpering exuberance, it has perhaps the hookiest hook anywhere in the Kraftwerk discography. I’m tempted to compare it to similarly bright and upbeat tracks from Yellow Magic Orchestra, such as “Ongaku”--particularly since it was also released in a Japanese-language version, as “Dentaku,” for that market. Still, there’s no avoiding that the subject matter of “Pocket Calculator” has taken a sharp turn back towards an iconically Kraftwerk subject matter: the inner life of the titular machine. While the narrator of the lyrics announces themself as “the operator” with the titular calculator, it’s also possible to interpret the lyrics as the voice of the machine itself. “I am adding and subtracting, I’m controlling and composing”--but who, indeed, is really performing these tasks: the operator, or the calculator itself? Perhaps a stronger example of Kraftwerk gone pop is “Computer Love.”

Music: “Computer Love”

Melodic, but also balladlike, “Computer Love” is an unambiguous return to the traditional pop theme of romantic love, absent from the asexual and perhaps childlike glee of “Pocket Calculator.” Its more plaintive hook is also an easy one to appreciate, and its theme is perhaps more universal: while listeners at the time may not have necessarily owned rapidly miniaturizing digital technology, surely, all of us have, at some point, felt lonely. “Computer Love” doesn’t just connect to that feeling, but it also offers us hope, in the form of an almost magical, futuristic solution for finding love. I think it’s the internal balance of “Computer Love” that makes me find it so captivating: it’s a song about despair at being alone, perhaps even intensified by the alienation of modern society in particular, but it’s also suffused with the romantic dream of computerized matchmaking services, which might, like so many other technological developments, tremendously improve one’s day-to-day life. In “Computer Love,” the machine is only a tool, a small piece of the overall human picture, and not the chief focus of the work--much as the camera for which “The Model” was posing was little more than a prop in that love story. But despite this optimism about online matchmaking, other tracks on the album seem more skeptical about our computerized future, including the opener and title track.

Music: “Computer World”

While Kraftwerk are best remembered as utopian thinkers, many of their compositions hint at the potential downsides to technological advancements, albeit subtly. Much like *The Man-Machine* alluded to works like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., the title track of *Computer World* prominently notes organizations like Interpol and Scotland Yard among those who may benefit from computers, hinting at fears of oppressive techno-surveillance expressed by works like Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report.” With its slinking rhythm and overall ominous feel, this track implies that we should be apprehensive, without necessarily stating what to fear, and I think that’s part of why it’s remained resonant. In today’s world of deepfakes and location tracking, we’re constantly vigilant over the nameless potential dangers presented by the machines in our pockets and handbags, even when we couldn’t explicitly state what they are. Our increasing distance from the album, in both time and technological progress, may present an obstacle to appreciating it as art. While it’s easy for me to get into the mindset of computers as something newfangled and exciting, having grown up earlier in the personal computer age and able to recall the way they were advertised and talked about in the 90s and 00s, I do wonder how this album sounds to my younger peers. At any rate, “Numbers” is the track that I think sounds the most like it could have been on any Kraftwerk album, and not just this one.

Music: “Numbers”

A classic example of how a simple conceit can fill a whole composition to its brim, “Numbers” remains one of Kraftwerk’s most iconic tracks. Nowadays, it might be best known for how heavily it’s been sampled by later artists, and the influence it’s had on hip-hop, that nephew of electronic music that is nowadays, somewhat arbitrarily, considered a separate genre unto itself. But ultimately, “Numbers” and its famous beat stand up perfectly well on their own. As a cosmopolitan panoply of languages recites the names of the numbers, we are reminded of the ways in which mathematics is a universal language. Not only does it unite mankind, but many have also wondered if it might someday be the key to communicating with people from beyond the stars--an honour also bestowed upon music itself. Structurally, “Numbers” is the second-to-last song on the album’s first side, and like many earlier Kraftwerk albums, it transitions directly into another part of a larger “suite,” connected both musically and thematically. “Numbers” becomes “Computer World 2,” which is not simply a reprise of the title track, but a sort of medley which also incorporates the whispering vocoders of “Numbers.” While in many ways, Computer World feels like an attempt by Kraftwerk to keep up with the times, the overall structure of the album maintains a sense of continuous, symphonic composition, not unlike the seamless “transfer” between “Trans-Europe Express” and “Metal on Metal” some years before.

The cover design of Computer World is another in the long list of the aesthetic triumphs of Kraftwerk, which, I maintain, are perhaps as important and influential as their music itself. Its bright yellows and greens remain eye-catching, as does its portrayal of the band members’ portraits, rendered on a computer terminal. Despite seemingly now only existing in cyberspace, their faces remain in the position we saw them in on The Man-Machine, projecting their beatific gazes towards the leftward horizon of the future. The struggle between the reality of a human being, and that which is affected by their simulacrum, is a strong theme throughout Kraftwerk’s discography, stretching back, at least, to “Showroom Dummies,” and the cover of Computer World seems to take it another step further. Now, we don’t even contend with the idea of physical replicas of humanity, in the form of trudging robots or glib mannequins, but rather with the idea of an ethereal, holographic doppelgaenger. With its title, the album asks us not only to consider computers as technologies in and of themselves, but about an entire new era, and a new way of being, which is brought about by their arrival and proliferation. In many ways, this way of thinking about the future was more correct than perhaps anyone knew at the time, and I think it’s this sense of vision that makes Computer World remain a vital artwork as opposed to a curiosity.

As I said in the beginning, Computer World is often considered to be the last great album Kraftwerk made, putting an end to their streak of classics that began with 1974’s Autobahn. Their follow-up to it was the troubled and controversial Electric Cafe, released in 1986, which attempted, unsuccessfully, to add more dance influences and samples with the textures of more traditional instruments into their sound. While I think Electric Cafe is an album not without its merits, it is certainly a substantial departure from the Kraftwerk sound we’ve gotten familiar with so far. I might characterize it as an album that perhaps went too far into the territory of attempting to keep up with the times, extending Computer World’s lunge for more accessible, lyrical pop further than it could reach. Whatever the motivations, it’s hard to hear Electric Cafe tracks such as “Sex Object” without being at least a bit startled at the group’s willingness to tackle the topic of sex so frankly. It might be the only Kraftwerk song in which being like an object or a machine is portrayed in an unambiguously negative light.

Music: “Sex Object”

I think my favourite track on Computer World is its closing track, “It’s More Fun To Compute.” With a straightforward repetition of the title as its sole lyrical content, and a brazen, strident synth blast propelling it forward, it’s another one of those simple, but utterly compelling tracks that Kraftwerk seem to have been full of. Despite the way it flips into something much more melodic later on, it’s the tumult of the opening bars that really sells me on “It’s More Fun To Compute.” I think the textural qualities are almost a bit reminiscent of the grating oscillations of their often overlooked earlier album, Radio-Activity. That’s everything for today, thanks for listening!

Music: “It’s More Fun To Compute”