COMPUTER WORLD
KRAFTWERK
1981’S COMPUTER WORLD SET A BLUEPRINT FOR WHAT WAS TO COME IN MANY NEW GENRES. IT MAY HAVE BEEN ITS MAKERS’ LAST GREAT ALBUM – BUT IT WAS ALSO THE FIRST GREAT GEEK ALBUM…
ANDY JONES
When Computer World arrived in 1981, Kraftwerk hadn’t really broken through to enjoy consistent mainstream success and were still only really known by a select fl ock of electronic music geeks brought up on Sheffi eld’s steely electronics, Foxx’s synthetic dystopia and Numan’s sudden chart forays.
Sure, they’d enjoyed success across the pond with Autobahn, and produced further electronic masterpieces on the most unlikely of subjects – trains, electronic brains and radioactivity – but, if anything, it seemed like they’d done their bit for electronic music and that they would just be consigned to a dusty shelf of music history alongside fellow Krautronica artists such as Tangerine Dream and fusion futurists NEU!.
Yet Computer World not only broke the band through into mainstream pop – ironically by way of the single The Model, originally from their previous album, 1978’s The Man-Machine – but tracks from the
album would end up creating, infl uencing, and being sampled by bands and genres; everyone and everything from hip hop and breakbeat to, well, Coldplay owe debts of some magnitude to Computer World. So, as a band, if this was going to be your last great album – and sadly it looks very much like that is the case – what a way to peak. And geek…
Kraftwerk, Tokyo, 1981: Wolfgang Flür, Florian Schneider, Ralf Hütter and Karl Bartos
Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images
In order to immerse yourself into the environment that was 1981’s world of computers, you should forget Apple (mostly), forget PCs (mostly) and, of course, forget mobile phones, tablets and everything else you know about tech nowadays.
The ‘home computer’ in ‘81 – the subject of track six, Heimcomputer, on Computer World – was only a reality for those people that had seen those snippets of Tomorrow’s World promising computers in every home, or who had wildly invested in brands like Sinclair, Commodore or Acorn, early producers of relatively cheap and cheerful technology.
THE SONGS
1 COMPUTER WORLD
Only Kraftwerk could get away with using deadpan, repetitive lyrics, a Speak & Spell toy and a vocoder all in one song. Combine those with the catchiest of melodic phrases and this track is the band in a nutshell; the ultimate Kraftwerk song that you’d play to someone who’d never heard them before.
They might think it basic, sparse, lacking of in-depth lyrics and a bit silly on occasion; Kraftwerk at their purest, then.
2 POCKET CALCULATOR
“A minimalistic approach is more important for us. We spend a month on the sound and five minutes on the chord changes,” Ralf told Electronics & Music Maker in 1981 in a rare interview, and you suspect that this was the track he was talking about. It’s essentially some incredibly simple melodies strung together in the most basic of arrangements and could probably (defi nitely) be wrangled from a calculator these days, and it either took the band 10 minutes to create, or two years… nothing in between. You shrug your shoulders, wonder which, and then realise that that is why it is a Kraftwerk classic.
3 NUMBERS
This author doesn’t mind admitting that it was this track that was the life-changing ‘live band’ moment. 1981, Hammersmith Odeon, 14 years old and – yes it might have been the massive spliff that someone was smoking in front of me (you could in those days… smoke indoors, I mean) – but as soon as the beats kicked in, I just knew I’d still be living in and writing about that moment 40 years later. And I wasn’t alone; Numbers was sampled to hell and launched an entire scene or three. But before you get too carried away, Numbers morphs back into Computer World’s second chapter, Computer World 2.
Yes, Kraftwerk are not exactly well-known for knocking out so many songs that they need a quadruple album to put them on and, even with its ridiculously short length, Computer World manages to get away with including the same track twice. But it’s got some Numbers beats in it and it’s Kraftwerk, so who cares?
4 COMPUTER LOVE
To say that Computer Love is as dreamily melodic as anything Kraftwerk have done is an attempt at the highest of praise – this is the band that did the album The Man-Machine, remember – but it really is as achingly beautiful as any KW track that proceeded it. It uses the old call and response motif – where one synth sound and melody works against (or indeed with) another – to beautiful effect and the lyrics are either about falling in love with a computer or using one to go on a date. We’ve all been there, right? (On both counts, actually…)
5 HOME COMPUTER
Kraftwerk, remember, did not use computers to create this album and the whole concept of computers at home – let alone used for music – was really just a twinkle in Michael Rodd’s eye at the time. Within months, though, teenagers everywhere were programming their own computers and beaming themselves into the future. This was our anthem; we sang it while we typed.
6 IT’S MORE FUN TO COMPUTE
You’d think we’d be ‘computed’ out by this point but we’re barely half an hour in, and it’s the last song – and it’s an absolute K-lassic to fi nish. It’s More Fun To Compute has a great, sampleable intro which many took advantage of, and it’s right up there with Numbers in terms of infl uence. In fairness, it doesn’t do much else once it gets up to pace, but what it does do is enough to weave into many a future remix… and into the compositional mind of a generation.