Why does Kraftwerk still sound more like the future than modern music?
When considering futuristic sounds, my thoughts flit involuntarily to the past. Indeed, all our experiences are in the past, and the present is just an illusion “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” to borrow a line from our literary friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet, it seems odd that, to me, futuristic sounds are those I heard in educational physics videos from the 1980s or those transmitted by Kraftwerk two decades before I was born.
The Germans are known for the sleek, industrial designs of Bauhaus and top-flight engineering. Heeding Basil Fawlty’s advice, I won’t mention the war, but it seems important to note that propaganda and movies made at a certain point in history portrayed the stereotypical German as a cold, emotionless robot in a well-oiled machine. When Düsseldorf’s Kraftwerk set out in 1970, they appeared to embrace these stereotypes.
In appreciation of Germany’s rich history in progressive design, Kraftwerk presented an image of sterile uniformity: neatly cropped hairstyles and matching suits behind a linear desk of equipment. This aesthetic complemented a progressive sound created using state-of-the-art synthesisers, vocoders and sequencers, invariably documenting a chapter in technological evolution.
From their seminal ode to the German highways to the synth-pop sheen of The Man-Machine, Kraftwerk seemed eternally conscious of the future. In fact, when they proclaimed “we are the robots” in 1978, they effectively embodied the future, lighting a path for the likes of David Bowie, Gary Numan and OMD. But placing aesthetics and artistic themes to one side, Kraftwerk’s catalogue sounds just as “futuristic” today, much more so than any contemporary musical style.
This phenomenon has several probable causes. Firstly, the 1970s was a decade of manic propagation in music and technology, the two waltzing inseparably. The 1969 moon landings had aroused widespread intrigue in outer space, with David Bowie’s star-studded flares and George Lucas’ Star Wars capitalising on the zeitgeist. Following the tragedies of the early 20th century, humanity seemed ready to embrace the future, pouncing on each technological breakthrough with the competitive enthusiasm of an attuned capitalist machine.
By comparison, today’s musical fleet has a galaxy of electronic sound production programmes at its disposal, but the arms race is over. Synthesisers, sequencers and drum machines have been used for the best part of a half-century, and during that time, fashions have shifted to a minimalist approach: where Kraftwerk used vocoders to emulate robots in 1978, modern pop artists use similar technologies for autotuned vocals.
This trend is bolstered by the present day’s comparatively nostalgic tendencies. Whether encouraged by apocalyptic paranoia or not, we seem content to live in the 20th century, returning to our dusty Beatles LPs while hailing the original Star Wars trilogy as a landmark success and the interminable 21st-century spin-offs as a mortifying stench on the cinematographic map. Accordingly, modern musical artists will often channel historical idols when creating “new” material.
If there’s anything the past has taught us, suspecting technological saturation is a complacent folly. Still, I find it very hard to imagine “futuristic” music as anything beyond the cosmic capabilities of the 1970 Minimoog.
I am pleased to reveal that I’m not the first to call this phenomenon into question. Cultural theorists Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher explored the so-called “hauntology” concept under the glaring light of musical evolution in the early 2000s, at around the point where our ongoing regression session clunked into fifth gear.
Fundamentally, hauntology is the idea that certain features of the cultural past remain indelibly relevant, “haunting” the future and guiding regressive trends. The term was coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, and ever since, it has grown in relevance.
In his 2014 book Ghosts of My Life, Fisher examined hauntology in the musical field by demonstrating how, like spectres of a foreign world, Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Kraftwerk close their talons on the present to curb the flow of creative evolution. “The very distinction between past and present is breaking down,” he opined. “In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.”
It certainly seems that cultural icons of the Presley and Bowie ilk will never be replicated, nor will we allow ourselves to forget these 20th-century heroes. Hauntological spectres might just have derailed the musical machine into a locked groove; we spin somewhere between the past and the future in a ceaseless revolution of featureless bilge in the pop charts and derivative nuance elsewhere. At the very least, we can rest assured the Kim Kardashians of the world will carry the cultural baton forth into an uncertain future.
