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I first heard Kraftwerk just after I spent my 21st birthday filling my bathtub with vomit to the news that George W. Bush had been re-elected. Everyone had just spent months looking with disgust at the images of the prisoners with their faces covered being electrocuted and attacked by dogs and covered in shit by smiling US soldiers. Most people hadn’t seen the other photos. The ones you had to find in foreign media or on message boards. The ones showing people who didn’t have faces to cover because they were blown up or buried in rubble or strung up above the Euphrates. We weren’t allowed to see the pictures of the people coming back here in coffins because someone decided that we were strong enough to send people off to kill and die, but not strong enough to see wooden boxes carried from planes.
The summer before, a guy that had played drums in my high school band talked to me with watery eyes about a friend that died right next to him and then said something about a confirmed kill he got, which was a striking way to change the subject. We were in the mall parking lot waiting for another friend to get off from work at the record store that I had stolen Larry Clark’s movie Kids from a few years earlier. I had to steal it because it was rated NC-17 and they wouldn’t sell it to me.
US operations and waves of insurgency had killed probably tens of thousands of Iraqis and just over 1,000 Americans by the time Bush got re-elected. The American deaths inspired the US to kill even more people and blow even more things up. This helped inspire even more insurgency and most people could see where things were going by this point. Despite what we were repeatedly told, the killing seemed to just lead to more killing, and I don’t know how the people who ever thought any other way got past the obvious. At least, they kept saying, we were helping rid the world of an evil. I mean, what kind of people would kill simply to maintain power?
The deaths and the contradictions about them weren’t the story we were told of course. We didn’t even get much on the confirmed kills front. Just platitude after platitude about heroes and freedom. The optimism some of us had during the initial wave of protests had already petered out and the anti-war movement, which we thought would change things, was gamely and bravely propped up by pockets of activists, but expertly sidelined by marketers and pitchmen angling for their next jobs. Way before most of us had even heard of avocado toast, disillusionment and war threatened to ruin the first wave of millennials, a supposedly hopeful generation. We were still a couple years away from the recession adding another notch to our generational bed post.
Those of us who were privileged enough to be going to college and doing what I guess was normal by then, but still felt weird for those of us with economic statuses where this was a new normal, this was all watched from TVs in dorm rooms and crappy college apartments. People were dying and we were arguing about Waking Life, or Derrida, or this crazy guy someone met at a party who claimed that he saw someone actually levitate while he was at an ashram in India. I wrote a poem called “Shock and Awe” for class. One time my roommate lit a lighter for like a minute and then pressed the metal to the top of his hand to make a point about war and the Stoics. I could smell his burning flesh while he maintained eye contact. It was impressive, but not confirmed kill impressive.
The night I first heard Kraftwerk, it was something like 4 am and my coffee table was littered with bottles, a porcelain cake stand that we found in my building’s trash room and now kept covered with cocaine, boxes of sandwich baggies, two scales, several bags of weed and mushrooms, rolling papers, the local alt-weekly, a walkie talkie that my roommate stole from the school’s public safety office and intermittently used to talk shit to the school’s police, and a couple of glass pipes, including one named Danzig that would get broken by being kicked off that coffee table, something I‘m still mad about. A bunch of people were there taking turns putting music on and getting high and hoping for a moment of connection or an idea that would make them forget whatever they were trying to forget. One guy opened up the 50- or 60- or whatever ridiculous number it was CD changer, and put a burned CD in. My roommate yelled at him to update the handwritten list next to the CD changer that kept track of where everything was.
When I first met the dude who put Kraftwerk on, he was really into Phish. We took mushrooms one night, though, and I made everyone watch 24 Hour Party People and we danced around the living room to New Order and the Happy Mondays on a red carpet I’d seen in some building after a party and thrown down the stairwell before jamming it in the trunk of a cab to take home. The wheels were in motion. Someone just had to work backwards a bit.
A couple weeks later, we were all watching the Directors Label DVDs, and there was a Spike Jonze one that had some behind the scenes footage of Fatlip from the hip-hop group the Pharcyde and Spike Jonze was driving around with Fatlip and Fatlip was talking about going to the club and listening to this band called Kraftwerk and doing a dance called the Freddy Kreuger which involved getting low and bobbing back and forth and holding your hands out and wiggling your fingers like they were knives. We were all about a month away from doing that dance like assholes whenever we got too high at parties. My friend who liked Phish muttered something about recognizing the name Kraftwerk.
This is the confluence of events I remember leading to my friend who liked Phish getting us all into Kraftwerk. Other people claim I got us all into Kraftwerk. I’m not sure any of us are totally reliable narrators, but the emotions check out for my version. Hearing about something and looking for it purposefully is a different emotional catharsis than having another human being blow your mind with something when you’re fucked up and the sun is getting ready to come up.
At first, at least in my version, I didn’t know the album was called Computer World. All I heard were pulsing beats, rhythm that was a little cold and clean but still immediately made me want to get up and move, and synths that floated through all of it, darting between, and occasionally rising over, the beats. There was a European guy in the middle of it all saying something about capital’s control of society and cops and government surveillance. As the 120-minute CDR finished Computer World and started the opening track of The Man-Machine, the room was dancing and laughing to proclamations that thinned the line between humanity and robotic workers. This was all very captivating to a room full of conspiratorial people in the years after 9/11. The sound of somebody describing our present from a past that sounded like the future.
But there was also a sense of hope and wonder as we listened on. Something that would become a trademark of Kraftwerk for me. The idea that we were all connected and capable of doing beautiful things. The idea that over the horizon there’s another horizon to look to even if you don’t always recognize it.
I think, with how far we’ve continued to spiral since then, people forget just how fucked up everything was during America’s initial War on Terror freak out. Everything was changing so fast: our own lives, our country’s role in the world, the technology around us, the role of the media, the ability of justifications to become facts. The mask was fully off and those who had always said that the freedom and liberty we supposedly had was a veneer were repeatedly proven right. There were death tolls and lying on the news every night so that’s at least pretty familiar.
Kraftwerk’s music acknowledged fear and change and still somehow looked forward with amazement and optimism. Their future would still have banks ruling over us and people having trouble falling in love, but it also had people who would keep trying new things, keep finding new ways to connect with each other, and keep looking for new ways to find awe.
A lot has been said about the eclectic backgrounds of Kraftwerk’s admirers. The electronic music that they helped pioneer made an impact not only on the variety of subcultures within that genre, but reached into post-punk and new wave, influenced the founding DJs of hip hop, and laid the groundwork for whatever you want to categorize Brian Eno and David Bowie’s legendary output in the 70s as. As electronic music became more and more prevalent, Kraftwerk, and the musicians they influenced, helped define the sound of popular music.
And so, you can have a group of friends that at any given time consisted of hip-hop kids, punks and hardcore kids, ravers, and art rock fans, all being in perfect agreement regarding an album choice. When it came time to put a CD on, barter would usually happen; people getting dibs on the next album because they weren’t totally into what was being put on. When Kraftwerk got suggested, they went on without complaint. It didn’t matter if they were following up Lord Willin’, Unknown Pleasures, or The Velvet Underground & Nico.
A couple years after I saw all those people together in one place for the last time, I’d go to a dive back in my hometown a lot. One side was a bar and punk venue that my friends who were still in bands played at, the other side was a diner with two items on the menu and a great old jukebox and $1.50 cans of beer. I’d play Computer Love—perhaps the most-melancholy, and most human, song Kraftwerk ever did—on that jukebox every time I went. Sometimes I’d play it more than once. I was laid off, living in a tiny bedroom in a three-decker with my mother, sending out cover letters and resumes all day, and going to the bar with my unemployment check at night. It’s cliché, but the song, part glimpse into the future, part reflection on the nature of loneliness, made me feel okay for a few moments at a time. People would groan when I went to the jukebox because they knew what was coming, but when that first synth line came on—the one that Coldplay would lift and do a pale imitation of for one of their massive hits—everyone was glad that the asshole who always played Kraftwerk had showed up that night. A shitty version of Cheers centered around a then 25-year-old song by a bunch of guys from Dusseldorf who dressed like automatons.
On one of these nights, I ran into someone who had once been a friend for what would be the final time. He had been to Iraq and talked about it a lot and clearly had some trauma surrounding it. I followed along, trying to be helpful and understanding and keep my personal feelings to myself, which was either the polite thing to do or cowardly. To this day, I’m unclear about how hating war but trying to understand and empathize with the troop you used to play with works. We told each other that it was good to run into each other, said we should hang out sometime with no intention of ever making it happen, and went our own ways.
Just before coronavirus made death tolls a normal part of our lives again, I found out that he had overdosed. A footnote on my social media feed. I went to college to be a dipshit that works on a computer all day and he went to war and talked to me over a cheap beer while Kraftwerk played in the background, and then I don’t really know what for 13 years. The first thing I could think of is the time that I accidentally broke the antenna on one of his brand-new walkie talkies the night of his birthday party when we were 8- or 9-years-old. I’d panicked and tried to hide it and he found it and his mom was pissed. They never found out who did it. We were sleeping outside in tents in his backyard where you could hear cars driving over us on the highway.
I don’t know why my first thought when someone died was about something I did. I don’t know how to handle death. Maybe trying to find meaning and comfort in associating things that seem unrelated, but personally resonate, makes sense. Maybe that’s all I’m doing now.
Just months after my old friend died, Florian Schneider, one of Kraftwerk’s founding members, died from cancer. It’s weird to think about what legacy means during a pandemic. Many of the predictions about the future embedded in Kraftwerk’s music have come true, but it was the melancholy optimism, and the sense of connectedness and possibility that was the heart of their work. I think we’re still working on that part. It’s funny that something so flawless came from something as fallible as people. Sometimes the cleanest, most perfect things can be the messiest and most human.
Maybe that’s contradictory, but so much of life is disentangling our thoughts and feelings and selves from contradictions. For people like Florian Schneider, contradiction could be used as an inspiration. For the rest of us, they feel especially brazen and painful sometimes, until you realize they’re always there and you’re just lucky to not feel them so oppressively all the time. Maybe you were born the right race or class or gender or sexuality. Maybe your family managed to scrape together enough to keep you from having to think about sacrificing your life or mental health at the age of 18. So now you’re one of the people lucky enough to be able to pretend the contradictions aren’t there every now and then. When you can’t, you try to find ways to cope. You try to find ways to live anyways. Mostly you just try to think of a future that is a little warmer and more welcoming even if it feels cold at the moment.
Brenden Layte is an editor, linguist, and writer based in Jamaica Plain, MA, where he lives with his girlfriend and a cat that was recently described as "terrifying" by a vet tech. He has previously written for places like Cognoscenti and Entropy Magazine. He tweets from @b_layted.