Kraftwerk: We Are All Robots
by Michael Hogan
Are we living in the future that Kraftwerk once imagined?
It’s become something of a cliché to say so, now that the German pioneers of electronic music have been inducted into the art-world canon thanks to an eight-date engagement at the Museum of Modern Art that wraps up Tuesday.
But what do we really mean when we say that Kraftwerk predicted our present?
Certainly, today’s music sounds a lot like the music Kraftwerk — and Kraftwerk alone — was making back in the 1970s and ’80s. It’s compulsory to mention that hip-hop founding father Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk in his early track “Planet Rock,” but Kraftwerk’s influence can be heard everywhere from Coachella’s Sahara tent, where the festival’s biggest house and dubstep DJ’s perform, to Top 40 radio, where Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry can be heard crooning over computer-generated bloops and blips.
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