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A few thoughts about watching Kraftwerk in 2025
Eric Ruby came into front row tickets to see Kraftwerk at the Orpheum in Minneapolis last night and asked me if I wanted to go. What am I gonna do, say no? Thank you Eric :) In lieu of starting a substack, here are some irregular casual and mostly unedited thoughts on this experience, here on my website =
Haha wow
- Who are all of these people? You're telling me all of these people listened to Kraftwerk before last night? This is the longest amount of time I’ve ever spent continuously listening to Kraftwerk, and I do still actually put trans europe express and computer world on every couple years. How often are the people who were at this gig listening to Kraftwerk? What else are they listening to?
- It's holy work to be able to stand there and play the same song 1000s of times in your life without literally losing your mind … have had this thought many times before but watching sole surviving original member Ralf Hütter sing "Man Machine" somehow made it really make sense to me for the first time that there's a "hall of fame" for this.
- "It’s more fun to compute" is funny when there are no visible computers on stage, only (ostensibly, invisibly) hardware. More like “🎶it’s more fun to play gear”
- Kraftwerk are presumably so universally respected because they're ancient originators (or HĂĽtter is, anyway) who seeded several entire new genres of music. In sound there are the elegant melodic lead lines; the clarity of interplay between the chuggy, always-mid-tempo overlapping rhythm parts; the ease with which the progressions can be tracked; the multi-language vocal part, which mainly serves to declare a theme. In composition, these limited elements are reused over and over, almost procedurally. It's such simple to follow, even didactic music. I suspect this quality in particular is why Kraftwerk reached so many people and was so influential: their music is remarkably easy to understand.
Hmm
- Another way to view Kraftwerk's absolutely consistent thruline of instrument voicing and composition is as highly-managed branding. They lean so hard into their “german design” thing that I would guess that german heritage is itself a prerequisite for being a member of the group. Their staging, standing at four podiums, from which again they may or may not even be playing music, has been consistent since at least 2012, and is now both iconic and highly rigid, as part of their iconography. This stage configuration may be the final part of "Kraftwerk" (the brand) to have been authored by Kraftwerk (the fellas).
- They didn’t play either of my favorites (heimatklänge, franz schubert) or my favorite super goofy one (pocket calculator), but I found their live-only one “tango” (which I’d never heard before) to sound good. I was both surprised to realize how many of this group's songs I really know by heart, how they really have so many big classic tunes, and how little "new music" or indeed even legibly live music I was hearing.
- There's a part of the autobahn video where they show normal-ass non-beautiful traffic on a highway, and my visceral feeling was, "this sucks, this video smells like diesel, car culture-ass video." Extra stupefying that they went on to sing about how it's "radioactivity" that's "in the air" that we need to "stop"... come on man.
- I can’t be the first person to comment on how women don’t seem to exist in the Kraftwerk universe, except in “the model” (which I mean, google the lyrics if you want). I’m not gonna read this too hard but I will say that all "design perfection" projects that include like, total masculinity as a seemingly inherent ingredient are always pause-worthy. You can imagine filing “woman member of Kraftwerk” next to “female cenobyte” and “Gwar woman”, but also "woman james bond" discourse, etc.
My critique
- "Kraftwerk in concert" is primarily a visual experience of a huge LED screen, vs an aural experience of amplified music, either played by a band or even as a recording. "Kraftwerk on stage" is way more like the blue man group than the rolling stones, or whatever. It makes no difference to me whether or not Kraftwerk are actually playing music; the only part of the whole concert with a legibly “present and irl” quality is Ralf Hütter singing the words to his now-ancient songs, his old voice totally legible as the one on the recordings, but also sometimes faltering slightly. Even so, though many people through the years have commented in my feeds about how the resulting stage show is "good," please allow me to be the one who says, idk, I think it’s bad. If anything, the thing on display here strikes me as being a clear relative of stuff like "immersive van gogh."
- Since the music consists mainly of ~40 year old songs played in static/stoic “'german' mode" from podiums, it seems like someone decided screen projections would add "novelty" or otherwise make things "more compelling." Okay and true to some basic "more is more" degree on both points I guess, but I also think this creates some funny complexity around what is otherwise highly cohesive music.
- I will ask the obvious: Since Kraftwerk themselves seem to be reaching for “timeless ideal” qualities in their sound, even successfully, why not just... let the concert experience be about listening? Alternatively, is the premise here that local orchestras might have an easier time selling out their halls if they hired local a/v artists to set up installations that gave people “something to watch,” while the “classical” music, now 250 years old, is animated once more by the voices of many real instruments moving together in unison… and that that's not interesting enough? Even if so, idk, might it still to some degree also be a distraction, to make one of the only spaces where active listening happens passive and in secondary favor of a visual experience of... even more screen time?
- Maybe you like the screen, maybe you don't, but here we are, and either way, you gotta admit, the screen they gave us sure is gigantic... in fact people all around me are shooting video of it. Maybe it's comforting? Is “the reason people don’t go to the movies anymore” because movies are projected, and what people want to see - are most familiar and most comfortable with - is giant screen, which light emanates from directly, pixel by pixel? Are there theaters with giant LED screens instead of projectors? business idea if not
- I can't help but compare with seeing Roedelius in New York in ~2016 - he just sat there and jammed for an hour or so, no projections I can recall, definitely not playing “rosa” or whatever. In the context of being a revered originator, it strikes me as unfortunate that Ralf Hütter isn’t just allowed to do whatever he wants up there for an hour (or worse perhaps, that given the choice, this is what he’s choosing), and that the open exchange between audience/performer is being de-emphasized in favor of “standing before and beholding the surface of Kraftwerk.” Will it still be possible to behold "Kraftwerk" after Hütter himself leaves the world too? Will it still be interesting? Is it interesting now? If so, why exactly?
- Okay, so, the projections themselves. So you have this very designed band aesthetic and perfection-oriented music, which has internal consistency, and is quite functional, but then you also have these videos playing on this wildass giant screen that do not seem subject to the same intensity, ownership, and standard of design. You have mapped projections colliding with vector graphics in a totally goofy looking way, you have jpeg artifacts. You have at least three ways that vectorized text is treated on the screen, with noticeably inconsistent scaling and framerates, sometimes with weirdly visible antialiasing. I saw different types of stock footage in black and white, some parts appearing digitized from old stock film, other parts appearing ripped directly from low quality digital sources… you could see the fuzziness of the film upscaled to the giant LED screen in the first case, and the artifacts from the digital compression in the second. I saw the video feed stutter three times. None of this seemed intentional; instead it seemed more like a basic lack of attention to detail; bugs in production.
Is it good enough for almost everyone? Obviously. But art like this, that's so obviously engaged with perfection and surface, is most successful - is maybe even only successful - when it makes its case in as total and internally consistent way as it can. Since these videos are simply not so buttoned up, I think they detract from the intended total effect in a way that's disappoiinting and worth calling attention to.
Consider Michelin Star-rated restaurants, which take a gestalt approach to the service, the table, the room, the interaction with the menu, the plating, etc. etc. as a single thing unified with the food – a total experience called "fine dining." The most aesthetically complete "fine dining" experience does not miss any detail. This is both the true product these restaurants offer and their higher function. They create a space wherein attention given to detail at a level of supreme rigor can be appreciated, and in so doing, they also demonstrate that such attention to detail can be taken on any arbitrary task, which at best, I find opens up onto a highly inspiring and utopian sense of possibility. Of course, it's this feeling that you're paying for in these restaurants, and that their value proposition is assessed around. The food can be good or even great and this kind of restaurant can still fail.
I think that's what's happening here vis a vis the video. Since Kraftwerk is definitely out here making a case for itself as Michelin Star-ass music, if I was Ralf HĂĽtter, I would absolutely fire my stage show's creative director for failing to unify the technical strategies and material used across my show's accompanying videos. I would complain that this work looks quite clearly like it was developed by as many as three different teams (or in three different kitchens, if you will) who did not communicate with one another, let alone share technologies or solutions. I would complain that work clearly made 12 years ago has obviously not been upscaled to match the quality of work developed more recently. I would demand that the surface of the video be as perfect and unified as the surface of Kraftwerk itself, as well as consistent with it; anything short of that will be undermining. I would even say, look at aphex twin, look at what his video guy is doing, look at the parity between the sound and the optics there. Then I would drive away at 45mph in my black Volkswagon.
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