Rock 'n' roll has a dark, unpleasant side, which makes it surprising that the Germans haven't made more of a splash in the genre. Naturally gifted when it comes to scaring people, and full of mischief, the Germans would seem to be a perfect fit with an idiom that prides itself on making anybody past the age of 30 fear that Armageddon is nigh. Given that the seeds of rock 'n' roll were first planted by Ludwig Von Beethoven, with his kick-ass, take-no-prisoners style, and that Richard Wagner's weird, apocalyptic musings have had an enormous influence on everyone from Led Zeppelin to Marilyn Manson, it 's odd that German rock has never really had its day in the sun. The only German rock band playing today that I am even vaguely aware of is Rammstein, a perky heavy-metal ensemble sometimes accused of promoting neo-fascism because they once used images by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite filmmaker, in one of their videos, and because their music seems to be popular with neo-fascists.
Further back, in 1983, an East German singer named Nena had a huge international hit with "99 Luftballoons," which was shown on the then-brand-new MTV several hundred times a day. The song supposedly referred to the Cold War, but nobody in the United States knew this at the time, as few Americans speak German, and those that do keep it under their hat. Nena never had another hit on this side of the Iron Curtain, and thus has become a joke to people who never had a hit anywhere.
I am not saying that the absence of German rockers from the scene is a bad thing, something that I lay awake at night mourning, like the sack of Troy or the fact that the Proclaimers, like Nena, never had a follow-up hit. I'm merely saying that it's odd.
The first time I heard a pop song sung in the language of Goethe was when Elvis Presley released "Wooden Heart," which had a few lines in German, and was recorded while he was doing his military service in Germany. Though it is heard in the 1960 film G.I. Blues, and was a hit in the U.K., the song was not released in the United States until a few years later. The tune, based on a German folk song, was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, whose hits (with different lyrics) included Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" and Wayne Newton's "Danke Schoen." "Wooden Heart" was awful, no matter what language it was sung in. Purists believe that Elvis was never the same after he went to Germany, and "Wooden Heart" confirms it.
In 1964, the Beatles released a couple of their hits sung in the language of Heine. The Beatles had once worked with Kaempfert, a native of Hamburg, where the group mastered innumerable styles of music, making it possible for them to write in many more styles and tempos than, say, the Dave Clark Five. We knew about these German retakes in the United States, but rarely heard them except when some deejay queued up "Komm Gib Mir Deiner Hand" just to be cute. That was the last time German-language music entered my consciousness or that of my compatriots, until 1974 when Kraftwerk released the song "Autobahn."
"Autobahn," whose purposefully insipid lyrics evoke the mixed feelings one has while driving on the highway, was a big hit in the United States. The song, which combined classic German hell-for-leather euphoria at putting the pedal to the metal with a lingering sense that driving in and of itself was a wee bit boring, came along at the tail end of the Moog synthesizer era. When the synthesizer first surfaced in the late Sixties with bands like Lothar & the Hand People, music lovers were thrilled because the highly sensitive instrument could do so many things, even simulating an entire orchestra.
But after Yes and Genesis and Electric Light Orchestra had been around for a few years, simulating entire orchestras, music lovers recognized the synthesizer as the enemy of rock 'n' roll that it was. Slowly but surely, the perception set in that synthesizers sounded too...synthetic. Kraftwerk ingeniously worked their way around the inherent symbolic drawbacks of the synthesizer by proclaiming themselves to be an explicitly technocratic, explicitly German band. They used drum machines and computer programs and tape recordings and electronic drum pads and mechanically altered vocals to affect a calculating brand of dance music for non-dancers that influenced everyone from New Order to Cher, though not always in the same way. If their songs, or compositions, or whatever term is best used to describe them, sounded cold, distant, robotic, this was no accident. This was rock 'n' roll at its most indefatigably clinical.
From the outset, Kraftwerk was a band shrouded in mystery. The band supplied the shroud. Kraftwerk was more mysterious than Brian Eno, who was more mysterious than Tangerine Dream, who were more mysterious than Captain Beefheart, he than whom no greater mystery was possible. One rumor had it that the band could not be reached by phone, not even by their record company. Another was that, like Blue Oyster Cult ("Don't Fear the Reaper"), which had an alter ego called Soft White Underbelly, Kraftwerk was actually Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band masquerading as languid Dusseldorfians.
[This is actually a retro-rumor invented this morning; a retro-rumor is a synthetic, anachronistic theory that, while untrue, sounds true to the type of person who could be persuaded that a new record called: Buona Serra, Meinen Herren: Andrea Bocelli Sings Kraftwerk had just arrived in stores.] Kraftwerk, itself influenced by Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa, had a great deal of influence on British pop music of the 1980's. They also influenced Devo, who may have borrowed their look from the band. In many ways, Devo is Kraftwerk turned into a joke. Over the years, much has been made of Kraftwerk's supposed debt to composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died last year, but Stockhausen's music still sounds inaccessible and daring, whereas Kraftwerk sounds like a cunning repackaging of music school minimalism meant to be played in a disco frequented exclusively by androids whose batteries are winding down. Kraftwerk goes in big for catchy descending themes repeated endlessly; the modulating downward riff from "Autobahn" sounds like the main theme from Cream's "White Room," while the motif from "Mitternacht" sounds like the music in the horror film announcing that the heroine should not have gone down into the basement.
It is said that the German Nobelist Thomas Mann began his novel The Confessions of Felix Krull when he was in his twenties, put it aside for a few decades, and then picked up right where he had left off. Much the same can be said about Kraftwerk's "Tour de France", which was last released in 1999. The youngsters who broke into the big time with the electrifying banality of "Autobahn" were back a quarter-century later as middle-aged men flaunting an equally riveting example of techno-pop at its most breathtakingly repetitive. If I were driving down the highway to hell, or even biking there, there's nobody I'd rather have riding shotgun than these out-of-control party animals.