TITLE: "Computer World"
ARTIST: Kraftwerk
ALBUM: Computer World
RELEASE DATE: 1981
My next door neighbor Bruce asked me the other night if I had any Kraftwerk discs he could borrow, and I met his reasonable query with my usual unreasonable response, that being "What am I, an asshole? OF COURSE I have fuckin' Kraftwerk discs!" Kraftwerk were so awesome and so unbelievably prescient that they ought to be considered fuckin' prophets! People get all uppity because their precious, shaggy-haired band of spleef-addled heshers haven't made it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and then strenuously cite the handful of bands influenced by their rinky-dink little beat combo as evidence of their greatness. Well choke this down, Miss Thing: the list of artists influenced by Kraftwerk is as long as the Great Goddamn Wall of China, but do you think Kraftwerk is going to get the nod anytime soon? Bahahahahahaha I doubt it, which only further exposes the Hall as the vacuous house of crap that it truly is. But I digress.
I first heard Kraftwerk via the daughter of one of my mother's friends. Mom dragged me over to her place one evening for dinner. This was about 1981, and I was about fourteen years old. Mrs. C, my mother's friend, lived in this massive Park Avenue apartment with her husband and teenage daughter, who were both out of the house that evening. While my Mom and Mrs. C chatted like a pair of hens in the kitchen after dinner (why I was invited along I'll never remember), they sent me off to the den to watch television. The den was way the hell off at the other end of the apartment (again, this place was so big that it felt like it had its own weather system). Not finding anything to watch on the tube, I decided to do a bit of snooping around and spotted a pile of records by the stereo that clearly belonged to Mrs. C's mysterious eighteen year old daughter, Annie. I couldn't stop myself from thumbing through them.
Amidst familiar records by bands like The Clash, Blondie, The Police and The B-52's, Annie had amassed a fair amount of LPs by this freaky looking quartet called Kraftwerk. Initially pegging them as a "Devo rip-off" (quite the opposite, I'd later learn -- although I'd qualify that by suggesting that Devo's appropriation of their coldly synchronized aesthetic was more homage than rip-off) I stared at the cover of The Man-Machine. All resplendent in jarring red shirts, pale skin, symmetrical haircuts and incongruous lipstick, the band looked like a squad of fascistic, gay, robotic Fred Astaire clones from a disquietingly Teutonic version of the future-- how could this record by dull? I slipped it out of its sleeve, put it on the turntable, dropped the needle (this was all rather bold of me, being that it wasn't my album, much less my stereo and certainly not my home) and was quickly blown away.
A few days later, I went down to the Disc-O-Mat at 58th & Lexington Avenue and bought the cassette of Kraftwerk's most recent work, Computer World. I hadn't heard a note off of it, but if it was anything like the record of Annie's I'd fleetingly heard, I knew it would be a keeper. I was right.
Twenty-seven years after its release (!!!) there's something quaintly cartoony about Computer World, given its chilly depictions of technological efficiency in the modern age. But seriously -- given that the internet was in its diaper-filling infancy at the time of this album, it's hard not to listen to song like the title track or "Computer Love" (which prefigured online dating -- much less cyber-sex - by a good decade) and not think that these guys were soothsayers. I mean, think about it – everything on this record came true! And to those who click their tongues and dismiss Kraftwerk's music as soulless or synthetic, well…if you can't hear the genuine beauty in their melodies, then you've clearly been listening to too much 50 Cent.
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