Kraftwerk More Influential Than the Beatles

Sorry, that was my mistake, ...I was under the impression that Kraftwerk had turned into a tribute band.


Cat

 

Classy! Shame you can't debate the question without resorting to that kind of stuff.

 

Exactly ! ....... for the Beatles, yes, it was pretty raucous and kind of refreshing to hear them cut loose a little.
But, if everyone is really being honest with themselves they would have to admit that it's a real stretch to claim they were alone in pioneering anything with that track.

 

I must defer to your superior knowledge of Take That's oeuvre, but that's only one of the three criteria. From what I understand, they were also a producer assembled group that didn't play their own instruments. By what honest criteria can the Beatles be considered a boy band, apart from the fact that they were attractive to young women? They were not pre-fabricated by producers. They wrote and performed their own songs at a time when this wasn't the norm. They had creative control over their artistic direction, as much as any popular recording artist could.

 

I'm not seeing a lot of difference.

BTW, did you know Pete Townshend wrote this in 5.15 about ushers having to spray perfume on the seats after a Beatles gig as the girls would wet themselves:

Girls of fifteen
Sexually knowing
The ushers are sniffing
Eau-de-coloning


And here is your typical Kraftwerk fan:



I think that proves my point!

 

From The Beatles to One Direction: The Evolution of Boy Bands

 

The Beatles to One Direction: 50 years of boy bands

 

From Beatles to the Wanted: A history of boy bands at a glance

 

But the Monkees wouldn't exist without the Beatles, it was an attempt to recreate the Beatles, even down to the funny drummer. The Beatles were the first boy band.

 

Fantastic post, and one which will surely annoy the Beatles fans on here. They are embarrassed to like that part of the history of the group with little girls screaming after them.
It's funny that the millions of screaming girls were easily the biggest section of the Beatles fan base, and they have mostly disappeared. What's left is a very much smaller predominantly older male fan base who are terrified that the group will be forgotten one day, so see it as their 'job' to spread the word and try to convert the uninterested masses.
The Beatles were much more fun in the early days and certainly the fans were.

 

If lazily posting links to such thoughtful musical authorities as the Star Tribune is what passes for argumentation, I suppose anyone can play that game.

Were The Beatles a ‘boy band’?

The Beatles are NOT a Boy Band! — So Who Is?

Here is Wikipedia's page on boy bands. Note that the Beatles don't get a mention as a prototypical boy band from the 60s, as opposed to the likes of the Jackson 5 or the Osmonds.

Boy band - Wikipedia

Whatever similarities there may have been from their earlier bubblegum days, the Beatles continually developed and matured artistically in ways that would have been unthinkable for the likes of Menudo or New Kids on the Block. It's a thoroughly superficial comparison, the stuff of revisionist click bait pieces.

 

This is a ludicrous argument. Hair metal borrowed certain aspects of glam rock. Does that mean that it's accurate to pigeonhole Bowie as the original hair metal act?

 

My avatar is not amused.

Outraged, in fact.

 

Didn't spot that until you said! Funny!

 

FTFY.

 

What I want to know is how we got from the Beatles to Kraftwerk?

And where does it go from here?

Putting aside, toward the goal of "unfiltered" answers, any judgement on which group is "better" or more "influential" or more "innovative".

Is it because we're living now in a digital age and clearly, THAT'S why?

I suppose digital instruments are just as "natural" as a piano, a guitar, or a saxophone.

We like the music that's in sync with our current technologies.

Or that holds special meaning to us...from our past as children and "young people".

We still love the music we grew up with.

 

I like the screaming girls. Elvis had them. Sinatra. Lots of greats. I could not care less about a term like boy band. A band of boys. Kraftwerk is a boy band. Buddy Holly and The Crickets are a boy band. The Beatles are hardly desperate. They are still crushing it after 50 years.

If anything is "desperate", isn't it this Kraftwerk thread (and dragging The Beatles into it)? A need to put them on the map and suggest that they are the great influence of all modern music?

 

Per Kraftwerk: Call Them the Beatles of Electronic Dance Music

June 15, 1997

Kraftwerk: Call Them the Beatles of Electronic Dance Music
UTON, England -- "IT WAS ONE OF THE BIGGEST parties of the year, the Tribal Gathering. More than 40,000 people spent some 20 hours in the fields of Luton Hoo Estate outside London in late May, dancing practically nonstop. Eight tents were filled with the cream of electronic dance music's current crop: from bands like Daft Punk and Orbital to disk jockeys like Jeff Mills and Carl Cox.

But the biggest attraction at the event -- celebrating a genre in which new music often becomes passe after a month -- was a band that is 30 years old: Kraftwerk. Emerging out of Dusseldorf, Germany, Kraftwerk gained notoriety in 1974 with the first song in German to break into the American Top 40, "Autobahn," which used electronic instruments to evoke the sensation of driving on an expressway. Since then, the band's reputation has changed from that of a novelty act into one of the most important bands of the last 30 years. It also remains one of the most enigmatic bands of the time, rarely granting interviews and letting more than a decade elapse between albums.

At the Tribal Gathering, one of the few shows that Kraftwerk has performed in the last few years, anticipation was high. An hour before the show was even scheduled to begin, a crowd of thousands had grown so large that the sides of the tent in which the show was held had to be raised to let those unable to get in see the stage. . In America, electronic dance music may just be beginning to break into the mainstream, but in Europe it has long since gone pop. And in many ways, Kraftwerk is responsible.

"The most striking thing about Kraftwerk is that we created this change from electric and acoustic music to electronic music, and this cannot be done again," said Emil Schult, an artist and lyricist who was one of the main conceptualists behind Kraftwerk's image. "We had a very serious way of working and a very strong urge for new sounds, and this is what this whole new generation is feeding on."

It has been argued in the press that Kraftwerk is the most important music group since the Beatles. Less debatable is the fact that what the Beatles are to rock music, Kraftwerk is to electronic dance music. The band laid down a blueprint for the music's future, developing an automated, impersonal sound that although it seems ultra-intellectual and European, slipped across barriers of race, class and nationality like mercury. This heritage was more than clear at the Tribal Gathering after Kraftwerk's concert, when techniques, melodies and ideas that Kraftwerk had used in its performance were directly ripped off by the bands and disk jockeys that followed.

Neil Young is often cited as the grandfather of grunge. To credit Kraftwerk as the grandfather of techno would be to humanize a band that likes to be thought of as part machine. Besides, Kraftwerk's legacy encompasses a lot more than techno. Think of the band as a lab technician synthesizing the DNA that provided the code for rap, disco, electro-funk, new wave, industrial and techno -- basically everything that has shifted the spotlight from guitars to studio technology in the last 20 years. Giorgio Moroder was listening to Kraftwerk when he made Donna Summer the queen of disco; David Bowie fell under the influence of the band when recording his studio-savvy late-70's albums in Berlin; Afrika Bambaataa constructed one of rap's first hits, "Planet Rock," out of two Kraftwerk songs. At the same time, British groups like Depeche Mode and New Order were adding a romantic glide to Kraftwerk songs to come up with synth pop. Even today, groups like Kraftwelt and the Elecktroids exist solely as homage to Kraftwerk.

Techno musicians are often accused of being reclusive and faceless, but as Kraftwerk's performance at the Tribal Gathering demonstrated, it is the original faceless band. It performed its song "We Are the Robots" without even being on stage. Instead, four legless robot bodies were lowered from a lighting rig and programmed to make mechanical movements to the music.

As with any artwork that appears years ahead of its time, the most nagging question about Kraftwerk is, Where did the music come from? The group's albums in the mid-70's seem to have emerged from a vacuum: no one else was doing anything similar. Unlike, say, Elvis Presley or the Beatles, who initially gained popularity playing their versions of black American rhythm-and-blues, Kraftwerk wasn't playing its version of any musical style. Though the group seems to have been influenced by the city-as-symphony philosophy of the Italian Futurists, the studio craft of the Beach Boys and the electro-acoustic compositions of German composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel, Kraftwerk was essentially playing its version of a conceptual idea.

When the group formed as the Organisation in the late 60's, Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider (the dominant duo behind Kraftwerk) were escapees from a classical conservatory playing the progressive rock that was sweeping Germany at the time, resulting in long, spacey, psychedelic improvisations by bands like Can, Tangerine Dream and Neu!, whose members belonged to an early incarnation of Kraftwerk. The band now disavows the first three albums it recorded as Kraftwerk, which are available today only as bootlegs, and prefers to begin its history with the 1974 "Autobahn" album, when its roots in hippie improvisation gave way to meticulous technology.

IN THE EARLY 70's, SOPHISTICATED electronic instruments were prohibitively expensive and often the size of a bedroom closet. So Kraftwerk was forced to build its own electronic drum pads, design synthesizers and commission the construction of a sequencer, which enabled the group to meticulously program, coordinate and repeat progressions of notes and rhythms. The band consisted of Hutter, Schneider and, later, the drummers Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur, who were all living communally with Schult, the unofficial fifth member of the band.

"We built one of the first sequencers, a small one that we could use on stage," remembers Flur. "And that was the first step for techno music. Without sequencers, it isn't possible. From the sequencer on, the music became more cold and more cold and more technical."

And so did Kraftwerk. The ultimate aim of the new Kraftwerk was to become one with its technology, to stop playing its instruments and let the instruments play it. Often the band would compose its music by just letting its equipment run for hours and seeing what came out. Hutter even dreamed of a day when he could stay home and send robots on tour and to interviews instead. Suddenly, as "Autobahn" became a surprise hit in America, the original image of Kraftwerk as bearded, mustachioed hippies gave way to one of clean-cut, impeccably dressed scientists.

"When we went to America in 1974, we bought fitted suits and things to be different from the sweating guitar bands," Flur remembers. "We thought the image fit better with our music: it's very constructed and cold. It doesn't come from a practice cellar. It comes from a laboratory."

With its 1977 album, "Trans-Europe Express," Kraftwerk created one of laboratory pop's masterpieces, a prescient album full of romantic synthesizer melodies over metronome beats conceived around a train ride through a borderless Europe. The album was released the same year as the Sex Pistols' watershed punk album, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols." But as punk rock was telling young people that they could form their own rock band without technical skill, Kraftwerk was sending out the same do-it-yourself message. But not only were skilled musicians no longer needed, neither were bands: just machines.

On the band's next brainstorm, the album "Man Machine," with visuals borrowed from Soviet art that glorified the automaton worker, it completed its conceptual evolution. The catch phrase of the "Trans-Europe Express" album, "We are showroom dummies," became, on this album, "We are the robots." The band started refusing to be photographed. From then until now, Kraftwerk has only allowed its homemade robotlike replicas of themselves to be used for press photos.

But Kraftwerk's conceptual high-water mark as human machines was also the catalyst for the band's undoing. Unlike Hutter and Schneider, the rest of the band wasn't ready to become machines. They were frustrated: the pair constantly turned down attractive offers for collaborations with, among others, Michael Jackson, Elton John and Bowie, and the band began working at a tediously slow pace.

"We developed in the end that we were the robots, and I didn't want to be a robot any longer because I had changed my personality over those years," said Flur, who now leads his own minimal electronic band, Yamo. "And I could not wait always six or eight years for the next album or tour. If robots stand still, then they get rusty. They always have to work."

The more Kraftwerk realized how influential it was, the more it became afraid of damaging that reputation. Meanwhile, with the themes of miniaturization and cheap, ubiquitous electronics on its 1981 album, "Computer World," coming true, anyone could have access to the technology that was once Kraftwerk's exclusive domain. Since "Computer World," the band has only released one album of new songs, "Electric Cafe," which, despite the title, was more an attempt to keep up with club music than a prediction of the rise of the Internet.

Last month, Hutter and Schneider turned in the first songs for a forthcoming Kraftwerk album to their label, EMI. Many fans are wondering if the pair can keep up their conceptual steam. Although now is the time for Kraftwerk to be appreciated, it is no longer, however, the time for the band to be inventive. By turning itself into technology incarnate, Kraftwerk destined itself to becoming outmoded, replaceable by new, updated models in the form of younger studio musicians.

"Now is a rebirth of the whole movement that Kraftwerk started," said Schult. "It's like a cycle in time. And it comes back because it's necessary to come back -- because something was left unfinished the first time."

 

Kraftwerk are in their 48th year and their recent UK tour sold out instantly.

 

It was intended as a mildly cheeky comment. Do Kraftwerk fans have a sense of humor?

Truth is there are quite a few tribute bands covering groups that are or were touring. I caught a performance of an AC/DC tribute band about ten years ago. It was interesting watching the vocalist switch between Bon and Brian era tunes given the difference in their delivery/range, but he was pretty good. Here's a short article on the topic if you're interested:

10 Tribute Bands Nearly as Good as the Originals


Cat

 

That article is 20 years old!

Not that it matters.

But saying they are The Beatles of EDM seems like a whole different conversation...

and one I wouldn't even quibble with, true or not. Let those into EDM duke it out!

 

I think it will be awhile yet before robots can laugh for reals.

 

No! We are the robots! I was not programmed for humour (though I was programmed with how to spell 'humour').