Pop und das Zeitalter der Reproduzierbarkeit: Kraftwerk

In an advanced German course (GRMN0500) focusing on the relationship between culture and technology, we explored what we mean by “culture,” the role technology plays in it, and how to differentiate the two. At the end of the semester, I designed a unit (spanning over two 50min sessions), where I introduced my students to the influential German music formation Kraftwerk. We explored the sounds, visual effects, and lyrics of that band, and I made use of the collaborative annotation platform Scalar to let students annotate music videos. To complement these discussions, we read an essay on pop theory by Diedrich Diederichsen, to discuss the concept of “sound” as a cultural identifier, and the significance of technology and technological reproduction for pop music. This highlight at the end of the course resonated well with many ideas we had discussed so far, particularly with Walter Benjamin's “artwork essay.”

In preparation for the first session, students were asked to annotate on Scalar the original music video for Kraftwerk's “Die Roboter.” (Fig. 1). A student writes:

Ich finde es eindrucksvoll, wie Kraftwerk die Illusion schafft, dass die Musik komplett von den Mannequins/Roboten gespielt wird. Die einfache Überblendung zwischen Menschen und Mannequin fühlt sehr ungeheim - es ist manchmal schwer, den Unterschied zu erkennen.

In class, we started the discussion by gathering ideas on what constitutes “pop music.” (Fig. 2) I then introduced the band, and we talked about the role of technology for modern music. This lead us to the essay by Diederichsen, who writes about the dissolution of the traditional “song format” (Liedstruktur), the role of technical effects, and about pop songs as reflectors of cultural trends, ideas, and anxieties. In our discussion, students became aware of many ways in which Kraftwerk's cultural productions are concerned with these very cultural phenomena, reflecting upon them, and playing with them. Students were also intrigued to realize that “pop music” is not synonymous with “mainstream” music, but a complex, cultural spectacle that is seriously theorized about.

As homework for the second session, students annotated another music video. This time, it was a video recording of a live performance of three tracks from the album “Electric Café.” The focus was on how the performance mixes repetitive beats and lyrics, industrial noises, and human-made, onomatopoetic sounds such as “boing-boom-tschack,” or “zonk” (imitating synthetic sounds). My goal was to electrify students, just like the audience at the concert was, by the ways in which Kraftwerk enacts the idea of electronic music as a power plant: not only setting people in motion like a machine, but also suggesting that the meanings of concepts such as “human,” “life,” or “art” have become radically transformed in the technological era.

Following that, we watched another music video in class (“Trans-Europa Express”, Fig. 4), to discuss how Kraftwerk situates itself as transnational project, and seeks to reconnect with avant-garde cultural trends in Germany as well as Europe, which were aborted by the Nazi regime in Germany. (Fig. 5) This professed goal to take up again and continue that which had been lost, led us to discuss how one can relate to the past, and to what extent it is even possible to reconnect to it, since more time has passed since then, and irrevocably changed the course of events. Students enjoyed discussing these complex questions as a way to see how artists attempt to imagine a lost past, and to nevertheless project it into the future. They also appreciated how in doing so, Kraftwerk actually seeks to transcend the limits of the national, in favor of a cosmopolitan ethics and aesthetics. The reconnecting and reviving of parts of a culture that were suppressed and often literally murdered, is achieved through the transnational language of electronic music.

We rounded the discussion off by thinking again about what Walter Benjamin (whom we read at the beginning of the course) had to say about “technical reproducibility,” and how this concept can be applied to a phenomenon like electronic music.