| "All pop music begins with Kraftwerk", it has been said--and, indeed, the 1970s experiments in minimalist electronics on the part of these four reclusive and bourgeois-looking young Dusseldorf men were directly responsible for the electrified landscape of subsequent decades of rock, pop and dance music. The album is dominated by its 22-minute title track, a beautiful electronic simulation of a motorway journey, from cranking up the engine to bowling along grey lanes cutting a swathe through the countryside, swerving and hooting the horn. Kraftwerk were prefiguring music's next step into the machine age but the antipathy they aroused in 1974 exposed the deluded Luddite tendencies of the pre-punk critical establishment who felt that music could only remain "real" by remaining as close to "nature" as possible. Kraftwerk slyly undermined this notion. After Kraftwerk, pop music would echo, not reject the sounds and rhythms of modern life. --David Stubbs |
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