Deep Cuts and Bruises #2 - Kraftwerk, "Kometenmelodie 2"

Second in a series eulogising great songs

It frustrates me that the only Kraftwerk album to make the endless Top 100 Albums In The World Ever listings is Trans Europe Express (1977). I mean, don’t get me wrong - it’s a great album, with two tracks (“Europe Endless” and the “Trans Europe Express” suite) that are cultural monoliths, monuments of staggering achievement. But they did better work that that. The Man Machine (1978) for example is simply faultless - a miraculous diamond of an album with no flaws in it. While Computer World (1981) is very very close to that level.

For sure, the earlier Autobahn (1974) is certainly less integrated and creative that those other three, but it does have several moments of wonder and majesty. The title track is well known, but to my ears the greatest moment is “Kometenmelodie 2”. Where its immediate predecessor “Kometenmelodie 1” drifts by to suggest the indifference of space, “Kometenmelodie 2” surges with a grandeur and beauty that are magnificent. The melody is simple - this is where Kraftwerk have hit upon their gift for tunes so simple and memorable you can whistle them, though it takes a few more records to make that consistent across an album. Underneath that is a wonderful rhythmic chug that’s both electronic and glacial, again demonstrating the group’s exceptional feeling for rhythm (gifts later used to magnificent use in tracks like “We Are The Robots”, “Metal On Metal” and “Neon Lights”).

Here in “Kometenmelodie 2” is a vision of the future beautifully laid out: a silicon-pure future of gleaming frictionless ecstasies. The digital world was coming and it would be glorious. This reminds me of how utopian the early view of the computer revolution was. As a Commodore 64 owner in the 1980s, I completely bought into that. We techno-nerds were simply dazzled and awed by what computers could do. It wasn’t just the games (though obviously they were a key part), it was the sense of a transformative culture being born. Word processing would make creating documents so much more fun. Spreadsheets with their dynamic cells would completely alter maths. Coding was the imagination transcribed in numbers and letters. And connecting computers, sharing data and information instantly, as you heard was happening… that left me dribbling with excitement. When I saw the front cover of (I think) Wired magazine proclaiming “EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG” in 1994 or so - this wasn’t a sad reflection of cynicial disinformation (as today), it was the breathless excitement of a revoltionary era. You can feel this vibe in U2’s Zooropa tour, too: the information revolution is here, so strap in. (Bono is a huge Kraftwerk fan. The first record he ever bought for his wife Alison, when they were just 16, was The Man Machine).

Early Kraftwerk can feel a bit unfocused - Autobahn has no consistent theme (and still uses regular accoustic instruments, such as the flute on “Autobahn” and “Morgenspaziergang”), while Radio Activity (1975) is more a connection of song-snippets than full realised works. But the sense of their trajectory is undeniable. “Kometenmelodie 2” is the first blazing star of their extraordinary talent, lighting the sky with its majesty, vision and purpose. It is both the harbinger of everything they would perfect and itself a profoundly moving piece, a herald of a digital future that only in recent years has soured. Here is where that vision was pristine and glorious and unique, before any other groups had cottoned on to what they were doing. (By the 1980s their children were everywhere: Depeche Mode, OMD, Soft Cell, Afrika Bambaataa, Moby and Joy Division to name but a few.) Kraftwerk made the soundtrack of the developed world from the 1980s to the 2010s. That is a cultural achievement of the very highest order.