Released
on May 10th, 1981, Kraftwerk’s seminal cornerstone of the digital age,
Computer World, is celebrating its 40th anniversary today.
At
the time of Computer World’s release, computers were not much more than a
curiosity. They were seen as something only used by huge corporations
and scientists for esoteric purposes beyond the concerns &
comprehension of normal people living their mundane lives. In popular
fiction, super-computers might take over the world, but people didn’t
perceive them as being part of routine activities. Kraftwerk, however,
saw what was coming and created a gleaming set of compositions which
celebrated the looming digital age. They saw how the computer would
become ubiquitous within our lives and homes and completely integrated
into our culture. Within a few years of its release, the first
inexpensive home computer systems were finding their place on desktops
around the world and started changing the way we lived, worked and
socialized.
Though Kraftwerk had well established the synergy
between people and technology with their previous LP, The Man Machine,
that album had dealt mostly with the mechanics of the day. Robotics,
space travel, urbanization and consumer culture were its focus.
However, a new branch of technology was fast gaining traction and the
revolution inherent in this advancement required a total rethinking of
both processes and production tools. In order to go to the next level,
the band would need to do a major overhaul of just about every aspect of
their methodology. There’s a three year gap between Man Machine and
Computer World which was necessitated by a full rebuild of their Kling
Klang studio setup. One of the objectives of this redesign was to
modularize and miniaturize their gear in order to make it more easily
portable for live performances and world touring. To accomplish this,
some pretty intensive engineering innovations had to be developed to
create the “work station” configuration they’d eventually arrive at and
continue to refine throughout the rest of their career. Each member of
the quartet would have a similar kind of setup which would help to drive
the sense of consistency and unity among the members.
Once the
technical aspects of their setup were addressed, then came the process
of composing a set of precisely and minimally arranged pieces to capture
the essence of the theme being developed. The album needed to show how
this technology would integrate into our lives and function as an
extension of both our physical and mental existentialism. They explored
the basics of the technology in Numbers, showing how the simple process
of digital calculation could be used as a creative infrastructure.
They anticipated social media with Computer Love. They identified the
entertainment value of the tool with It’s More Fun to Compute. They
foresaw the arrival of the computer as a standard appliance in Home
Computer. They predicted the miniaturization which would eventually
lead to devices like smart phones in Pocket Calculator. Nearly every
aspect of computer technology which we now take for granted was spec’d
out here and delineated.
The impact of the album was immediate,
profound and continues to resonate to this day. Starting in the early
1980s, hip-hop producers like Afrika Bambaataa began liberally sampling
from it, along with earlier works like Trans Europe Express. Once House
music and Detroit techno started to emerge in the mid to late part of
the decade, a new generation of producers regularly referenced and paid
homage to Computer World and earlier works, through both direct sampling
and more oblique acknowledgements. Again and again, throughout the
ensuing decades, Kraftwerk’s prescient masterwork became a touchstone
for each new generation of electronic music and techno-pop
practitioners. And Kraftwerk themselves would continuously find ways to
reinvigorate their creation through remixes, remakes and reissues and
live performances which consistently found ways to update their sound to
make it relevant for the present day. They were simply so far ahead of
the curve, even their most perfunctory efforts were able to align these
works with the latest trends.
Personally, Computer World is what
I perceive to be the high water mark for Kraftwerk in terms of
foresight and innovation. The follow up album, 1986’s Electric Cafe,
while possessing some great tracks, was not able to capture the kind of
cultural zeitgeist that had been perfected on Computer World. Both in
terms of technology and conceptualization, the perfection of Computer
World is essentially impossible to surpass. It came along at the
perfect time and in the perfect form and nothing the group has done
since then has made such a massive leap forward. You can look back
across the preceding albums and see a clear progression from the
abstract experimentalism of the early albums through the shift into more
controlled composition, all the while also refining their image from
intellectual hipsters into meticulously groomed cultural executors.
Once you hit that height of materialization, there’s not much room to
move beyond making periodic adjustments in order to maintain one’s
altitude. But that’s not a criticism as I have seen them perform live
within the past 10 years and was squarely blown away by what they put on
stage and how powerful its presence remains. If it ain’t broke, don’t
fix it.
