On August 14, 2024, Spanish paper El País had this article on the 50th anniversary of Kraftwerk's Autobahn.
‘Autobahn’, el disco de los pioneros Kraftwerk que inauguró la era del pop electrónico, cumple 50 años
Here's the Google translation.
‘Autobahn’, the album by pioneers Kraftwerk that inaugurated the era of electronic pop, turns 50
Elena G. Sevillano
7–9 minutes
It was with their fourth album, Autobahn, in 1974, that the German band Kraftwerk found their holy grail. With a daring that disconcerted critics of the time, they placed synthesizers and drum machines at the center of their compositions. That album, which turns 50, was the seed of something new: in their songs they distilled a synthetic, robotic and minimalist sound; something that was cold and at the same time intensely evocative. Autobahn had inaugurated the era of electronic pop...
Their sound, consolidated in the following albums with songs like The Model, The Robots and Computer Love, paved the way for the emergence of great British techno-pop bands in the eighties such as Depeche Mode, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) and Human League, and continues to beat today in songs by Coldplay and in the staging of Daft Punk, among many others. The group, which after the death of Florian Schneider continues to be active with Ralf Hütter as captain, continues to cultivate its enigmatic aura, with very few interviews and the usual distance from its fans.
“Kraftwerk are the most important group in the history of popular music in the last almost 60 years,” wrote Andy McCluskey, singer of OMD, in the British magazine NME last September. He heard Autobahn at 16 and it changed his life: “That was the future.”
What did this new music evoke? Industrial soundscapes in futuristic environments to the rhythm of technological progress. The title track, Autobahn (highway in German), which lasted almost 23 minutes, was intended to suggest the pleasure of driving on the efficient German motorways, one of the great national prides.
It's beginning, however, was not very convincing. “The critics were lukewarm,” recalls the veteran German music journalist Jan Reetze, who has just published the essay Die Geschichte von Kraftwerks "Autobahn" (The History of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn), in which he analyzes the album from musical, cultural and technical perspectives.
“It was something new, and rock music critics pointed out that it worked well and that Kraftwerk had made a great leap compared to their previous albums, but they did not know very well where to place it. This was no longer rock music, but it was not serious music either, like Stockhausen or Ligeti,” Reetze answers EL PAÍS from his residence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA).
Guided by the expertise of producer and sound engineer Conny Plank, the approach to the album was technically disruptive: “Autobahn was the first pop album to use electronics, especially the Minimoog synthesizer, as the defining element for an entire album,” he sums up.
Categorizing the group was not easy either. The band’s founders, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, from Düsseldorf in the Ruhr area, saw themselves as a kind of alchemists who used the latest technology to create new sounds. With the addition of Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos shortly afterwards, they completed the original quartet that would come to be dubbed the “Beatles of electronics.”
They combined a self-absorbed stage performance, with the four performers playing their keyboards like technicians in a laboratory. “From the beginning they saw themselves not so much as a conventional band, but as a kind of multimedia art project,” Reetze suggests, a kind of gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art with Wagnerian roots, combining music with design and the performing arts. They also cultivated an aloof image: “They made themselves inaccessible to both fans and the press; they put the joint project first and rejected personal stardom.”
Unexpectedly, the Autobahn album was a tremendous success in the United States. “It was a fluke,” Reetze emphasizes; “nobody could have predicted it.” “It was mainly university radio stations that discovered the album and played it all the time; students loved it and ordered it by mail (local record stores usually didn’t carry it).”
The Autobahn melody was meant to emulate a long highway trip. “It’s basically a description of a car journey from Düsseldorf to Hamburg,” Wolfgang Flür summed up, quoted in Uwe Schütte’s 2020 essay Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany: “If you know the route, you’ll recognise the sounds: the mechanical sounds represent the industry of the Ruhr Valley, the conveyor belts of the mining towns of Bottrop and Castrop-Rauxel. Then you have the strip through the rural area of Münsterland, where the countryside is symbolised by the flute and the song gives a completely different feeling. In short: Volkswagen and Daimler, Thyssen and Krupp, beautiful landscapes, and in between the long, winding autobahn – a classic German tale of our times.”
On their transatlantic success
Perhaps one of those curious misunderstandings helped in understanding the songs. While the original lyrics read “Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n auf der Autobahn” (we drive on the highway), in English they sounded very similar to “We have fun, fun fun on the Autobahn.” It seems that somehow this similarity connected the band with the Beach Boys and their song Fun, fun, fun. “Of course, this is nonsense, but there was not a single article in the American press that didn’t mention it,” says Reetze.
“The success on college radio was enough to push the album to number 5 on the Billboard album charts,” Reetze recalls. The record company then shortened the song from 22:40 to three and a half minutes and it was also a hit on the singles charts: 23 in the Top 40. In the US, Kraftwerk found a very receptive audience and even went on a 40-concert tour.
This unexpected coup opened the doors to the United Kingdom, where their music, with albums such as Trans Europe-Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978) and Computer World (1981), inspired a new generation of young groups that would become world references in electronic music.
“Their greatest influence, I think, was in the second half of the seventies and eighties. The new wave and the new romantics of the United Kingdom, with bands such as Depeche Mode, OMD and New Order, among others, could not have been what they were without Kraftwerk; even a band like ABBA has Kraftwerk influences,” Reetze lists.
Their success is also attributed to a more earthy approach than other contemporary groups making electronic music. “While Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and most of the Berlin school created very meditative and abstract cosmic music, Kraftwerk developed a kind of narrative that everyone could connect with,” Reetze notes. Their “factory folk music” fascinated pops like Brian Eno and David Bowie, who dedicated a song to Schneider.
In the US, Kraftwerk’s footprint is more indirect. “Autobahn was a hit, but it stopped there,” Reetze notes. However, in 1977 the album Trans Europe-Express was very well received by disc-jockeys in Chicago, Detroit and New York, who used it for their mixes. “That’s where you can find the trace of Kraftwerk, in today’s house and hip-hop,” he details.
Half a century later, Kraftwerk, now without Florian Schneider, who passed away in 2020, continues to incorporate the latest advances in musical creation. “They have always tried to be at the forefront of technology, and they adapt their repertoire accordingly. If you go to a Kraftwerk concert today, it is surprising how fresh songs from 50 years ago sound, such as Autobahn, which is still one of their central themes,” Reetze emphasises.
That album from half a century ago started a movement that shook pop. Schütte summarizes his impact like this: “As we know today, Autobahn would end up forever changing the course of 20th century popular music”.
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