It seemed a fitting tribute to Frankie Knuckles, the legendary spinner of dance music who passed away on March 31 from complications related to diabetes, that I was uptown last night at the United Palace Theater, a former movie palace repurposed as a high-functioning music venue, to feel the robotic pulse that influenced Knuckles and countless other deejays across the globe: Kraftwerk.
There are very few groups that can truthfully claim the kind of influence Kraftwerk has had on modern pop music. There were others, certainly — Giorgio Morodor, for starters, not to mention hundreds of deejays from New York, Chicago, and Detroit — but the mechanical rhythms and arpeggiod synth lines that glide along like sleek trains became an integral part of hip-hop, house, techno, and its many offshoots, while their robotic personas were enough of a blank slate — devoid of standard celebrity personality — that it was easy for various subcultures to take their work as the raw materials to build upon.
Techno artist Carl Craig once claimed, in an attempt to explain their appeal within African-American dance subcultures, that Kraftwerk “were so stiff, they were funky.” I’ve always liked that turn of phrase, and even more so today because the group, or what’s left of them — Ralf Hütter is the sole remaining original member — is decidedly not funky. Their recent performances, including highly touted stints at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London, have been part of an attempt to stake their place within an art historical context. That’s wonderful, and needs to happen more. The problem of course is that “music” and “art,” especially when defined by institutions, have tunnel vision, and have yet to realize that the two worlds are not mutually exclusive.
This is how I ended up at a Kraftwerk show where nobody danced. Looking around the theater at one point, observing the stillness of the audience’s enraptured gaze under the three-dimensional projections behind the band, letting out a little cheer every time an object on the screen appeared to be whooshing over our heads, gave the entire thing the feeling of being in a planetarium.
This is a nostalgia tour after all, so I shouldn’t have had such high expectations. Kraftwerk ran through the hits — “Autobahn,” “Trans-Europe Express,” “Computer World” — and ended their two-hour set with some recent numbers that left the crowd a little restless. While the projections were often literal — lyrics from the songs, an image from a train during a song about a train — and bordered on the absurd, I’ll admit that listening to “Radio-Activity” in a room that size, absorbed by the sound and lights and projected images, was genuinely moving. It was also the song I was looking forward to the most, so it’s possible I was just trying really hard to have an emotional experience, even if it was like squeezing water out of a rock.
But maybe this is the logical place for a group like Kraftwerk to end up. “The Robots,” the song they opened with, is a declaration of their aims, and their concept of the “man-machine,” stripped of human emotion, emphasizes the idea that these bandmates are interchangeable objects. That’s partly why nobody seems to care much that other, faceless-nameless old men have replaced three of the four original members. But it’s also why the music that was once so stiff that it was funky is now just stiff.
