It's a spoiler, you know the routine... Who else was there? I was in the
white Kim's longsleeved tee, and I managed to score the box seats on the lower
level on the right. Pardon me if I offend you when I call their songs exactly
the same I'm talking about the versions on The Mix and live, not the
originals...
Ginger & Posh; Puffy & Mase; Ralf und Florian?
Well, not exactly, but Kraftwerk didn't get a Number one hit in Autobahn, and
an incredibly cultish legion of fans, without perfecting the electronic pop
song, creating a product as wonderfully formulaic as any hit on Hot 97 or
Z100. Instead of a 3 minute single hook, single beat, single melody ditty,
Kraftwerk reconfigured pop to the digital age, with sprawlingly long songs,
multiple beat changes, simple synth melody lines, and portentiously futuristic
vocorded rhymes about technology and transportation. Every song exactly the
same, every song a gem they're the Spice Machines.
The pop quality of Kraftwerk was made incredibly clear over the course of
their show at Hammerstein Ballroom, where they played their perfected,
digititized hits, stripped of any of the analogue warmth and variation
displayed on the original albums. Instead, the songs were polished to a fine
sheen, slick enough to rival anything on the top 40. Song after song they
drove the adoring crowd crazy the encores were particular highlights, in
which the black-suited, shaven-pated Kraftwerk 4 emerged from behind their
banks of equipment to do a little dance and play a semi-improvised version of
Pocket Calculator. They then proceeded to leave the stage, and the video
screens behind them rose to reveal their robot manequin twins playing We Are
the Robots. By the time Kraftwerk came out for their second encore in
glowingly gridded Tron suits, they had the crowd completely in their iron
palm, and converted to their very German worldview. We all wanted to "Stop
the radioactivity" (hell, I learned that some power plant will cause "death
and skin cancer"), and have "fun fun fun on the Autobahn." If only they had
instructed us to partake of "computer love", my night would have been
complete.
The only really weak moments of the show were when Kraftwerk deviated from
formula to play new in-progress instrumentals after all, who would want to
hear Puffy's beats alone without Busta or Sting in the house? The stage show
never disappointed stock footage of the Tour de France and vintage
Volkswagens, flashing numbers, and a Mondrian whose lines and rectangles slid
up and down the canvas, living in a world both geometric and orderly, yet
constantly in flux Kraftwerk's world. By the time the last "music non-stop"
ground to a halt, everybody left happy. The only difference between this show
and one of those that sells out arenas in 8 minutes, was that the satisfied
customers weren't teenage girls or Funkmaster Flex's shoutout faithful.
Instead, the squealers in the crowd were Gen X hipsters and computer nerds of
all ages, all of whom had found a pop they could call their own.
Sam