Kraftwerk's 'Autobahn' was one of those many songs I loved to hate, only after a few decades am I able to respect their contribution to music a bit better. Although I had some friends in the 70s who were Kraftwerk fans, I always stayed clear of their music. Later in my industrial music years one of my band members supposed that we come from two different strands of pop reception, he was from the Kraftwerk side, and I came from the Frank Zappa side. I never really agreed. Kraftwerk was just too commercial to me.
It was very clear to recognize what Kraftwerk were doing musically, to me it wasn't new to use minmalism in pop/rock music, bands like The Velvet Underground, King Crimson, and others were already doing it, sometimes with more radical results. Minimalism was by then an almost old genre in classical music. I thought the idea was of preference: Frank Zappa would never have had a problem composing something similar, it was just not his kind of thing. Surprisingly, I can't recall that he ever bothered to parody the genre either.
I also understood Kraftwerk's attitude, a somewhat ironic take on a music of the future, presenting themselves as robot slaves to the music, simultaneously celebrating new technologies and warning us about them. 'Autobahn' was a particularly twisted anthem celebrating the modern highway. At the time you could come upon older Germans who'd regularly argue that Hitler was certainly bad because of the Holocaust, but he built the Autobahn! Besides being a hideous comparison that statement was also historically incorrect, since the building of highways was simply a continuation of policies established in the Weimar Republic before Hitler's regime. Any German would recogznize the reference, though.
By today you can't underestimate Kraftwerk's influence on modern pop music (nor Zappa's, for that matter). And I was also a bit wrong about 'Autobahn', since - at least in the long 22-minute version - there's a lot of interesting things going on in the song.
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