KRAFTWERK

An appropriately chilly and brainy history of the pioneering German electronic group.

Founded in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk (“power station”) was an unlikely pop phenomenon. Their early hit “Autobahn” was a distillation of a 23-minute track meant to evoke the drift and speed of the national highway, and the members cultivated such an austere persona they were all but anonymous. While playing live, the members lined up like a row of passport-control officers, with practically no audience banter. Schütte, a literary scholar and hardcore Kraftwerk fan, doesn’t strive to crack the ice that encases the band’s public image. We learn little about the personal lives of Hütter, Schneider (who died in 2020), and company—except about their obsession with bicycling, an avocation that informed their final studio album, 2003’s Tour de France Soundtracks. What the book lacks in personal insight, though, it makes up for with the author’s well-researched understanding of the thinking behind their music. The Kraftwerk philosophy is best summarized by the title of their 1978 album, The Man-Machine: The band strived to capture the bustle of their industrial city (and the roads around it) while contemplating (and lightly satirizing) notions of humanity’s perfectibility. Because they were so savvy about embracing new technologies—they hired an engineer to wrangle the notoriously complicated Synclavier II synthesizer—they were of-the-moment well into the 1980s. Because their songs focused on the integration of man and technology (cars, trains, computers, bicycles), they never became irrelevant. Beyond the theorizing, Schütte suggests, Kraftwerk also paved the way for Germany to develop its own cultural transformation from “genocide [to] a brighter future inaugurated by a post-war generation that had learned its lessons from a terrible history.” A more intimate and thorough band biography would be welcome, but intimacy was never Kraftwerk’s long suit.

A well-turned introduction to a band whose sleek surfaces belied complicated ideas.