Kings of the road

The start of Kraftwerk’s imperial phase – or the end of the road for Hütter and Schneider’s original project?

John Mulvey

Kraftwerk Autobahn PARLOPHONE. DL/LP/BR 1975 IN THE Motor City, and Lester Bangs is unsuccessfully hassling Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider to pose for photographs by a Detroit freeway. Soon enough, Kraftwerk will create a fully-automated music, a sound local Michigan producers will streamline even further into techno. For now, though, their replacement by robots is a distant fantasy, and the advent of music entirely generated by AI even more remote. The journalist, not Kraftwerk, is the one who seems most invested in an idea of electronic music where flesh and blood artists are rendered obsolete. In a piece which eventually appears in both Creem and NME, Bangs pontificates at length about the imminence of our machine overlords and “The Cybernetic Inevitable”. “What’s to stop the machines,” he asks, “from eventually…

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MOJO (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2025

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