But listening now, and knowing the New Romanticism that Ultravox would spawn once Midge Ure later joined, the biggest surprise is how “Satday Night In The City Of The Dead”’s terrace shout anticipates oi! music. Kraftwerk was a widely stated influence (a punk first, or close to it), but so were Roxy Music and Berlin/Eno-era Bowie, and the longer songs suggest they were secret prog (at least maybe Van Der Graaf Generator) fans as well. They got way synthier (and way less interesting) later, but something new was happening here for sure: Five theoretically punk-rock London lads, produced by Brian Eno and distinguished by a fellow doubling on electric keyboard and violin, a seven-minute song called “I Want To Be A Machine,” and a cyborg-stiff cover photo that suggested they were already halfway there. If not them, though, who might have done it? Sticking to band-like units on the new wavier end of things, and leaving aside visionaries from the worlds of Eurodisco (Giorgio Moroder, Gino Soccio, Cerrone) and electronic funk (Afrika Bambaataa, Arthur Baker, Juan Atkins), here are eight possibilities. ![]() So now, for winning the race to such a big idea, Kraftwerk get to play eight nights at the Museum of Modern Art. But in some ways they went farthest, in that they left being a “rock” band behind – and we got disco, electro, techno, and scores of subsequent offshoots to show for it. In ‘70s Germany, where rock bands invented a new language to live down the travesties of Das Vaterland, they were hardly alone. Kraftwerk envisioned popular music’s future, and it was a future in which you didn’t have to sweat much or get dirt under your fingernails or master organic instruments, a future free of manual labor and manual dexterity, a future of looped repetition and sleek Teutonic technology and robotic computers.
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