The true meaning behind Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’
It took electronic pioneers Kraftwerk four albums to finally crack their sound and ethos.
With three albums behind them, discounting 1970’s Tone Float from predecessor band Organisation, founding members Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider finally began to carve their visual and sonic identity away from the krautrock avant-gardists that were jamming free-form improvisations à la Neu! or Faust. Gone were rag-tag long hair and jeans, in came tailored suits and cropped haircuts that would prove essential as the uniform de rigueur of their evolving refinement.
A strict commitment to their aesthetic boldly conveyed the new musical language Kraftwerk was forging. Just as their sartorial flair owed nothing to the double-denim Woodstock residue or glitter glam dominating the charts, the instruments wielded by the day’s prog wizards would also find a more respectable home in Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang home studio in Düsseldorf, acquiring family in the Minimoog, an ARP Odyssey, customised Farsifa organs, and that all-important vocoder. Such mystical hardware would pull synthesisers away from the paragons of rock excesses and thrust them into a new realm of switched-on mystery and analogue intrigue.
The final component to tie their multi-faceted gesamtkunstwerk art project together was a conceptual illustration of their beloved German hinterland. While a more continental embrace of Mitteleuropa’s romantic beckon would shine on 1977’s Trans-Europe Express, the vast motorways constructed during the country’s Reichsautobahn era of the 1930s and ‘40s first sowed the seeds for Kraftwerk’s affectionate fascination with their nation’s cultural history. Specifically inspired by the rush felt when driving at limitless speed between Düsseldorf and Hamburg, Kraftwerk, now with Wolfgang Flür in the fold, sought to compose an aural journey down the endless stretch into the old Province of Westphalia.
Across its 22 minutes on the namesake album, ‘Autobahn’ traverses across the motorway that snakes passed natural Germanic landscapes and smoking factories, sonically shape-shifting in accordance with where our explorative autofahrer is cruising through. As detailed in musicologist Uwe Schutte’s 2020 work Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany: “…if you know the route, you’ll recognise the sounds: the mechanical sounds represent the Ruhr Valley, the conveyor belts of the mining towns of Bottrop and Castrop-Rauxel. Then you have the stretch through the rural Münsterland, where the countryside is symbolised by the flute, and the song is completely different in feel.”
While acknowledging The Beach Boys’ influence on creating pop music that sounded like California, and thus wishing to achieve the same for Germany, ‘Autobahn’s “fahren fahren fahren” refrain was not in fact a wry nod to ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’, released ten years earlier. Co-written with frequent collaborator Emil Schult, Hütter and Schneider instead deployed their Teutonic tongue to present a lyrical terrain of rhythmic chants and sturdy lines. These interlocked and affixed themselves to ‘Autobahn’s propulsive journey, with each “Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n auf der Autobahn” passing the window with regular uniformity like a routine whizz of roadside lights or signs that dot the highway landscape.
The romanticism Kraftwerk was striving for was lost on the UK issue of Autobahn, depicting an austere motorway graphic and later adopted by Kraftwerk themselves when rereleasing their back catalogue with revised artwork in 2009. Schult’s original German cover captured exactly what Kraftwerk’s vision for the album was, however, a radiant illustration of West Germany’s unreined optimism, shaking off historical baggage and disappearing into the sunny horizon in one’s VW Beetle.
While Kraftwerk would be forever associated with the staid automatons they cemented with 1978’s The Man Machine and forever onwards, Autobahn and its centrepiece title-track stands as a glorious counter to their accusations of unfeeling detachment and instead delivers a shimmering, electronic masterstroke glowing with heart and human spirit.
