We’re being watched and we feel our pulse
A love letter to the lyrics of Showroom Dummies by Kraftwerk
Eins, zwei, drei, vier.
That’s Kraftwerk, counting themselves in.
Even machines, it seems, need help keeping time now and again.
It’s a joke, of course. A peek around the fourth wall. A hint that, in 1977, Kraftwerk’s gesamtkunstwerk was coming into its own. It was more futuristic and fantastical. Yet also more playful, and more engaged with the world and the time in which it was being made.
It was the year of Trans Europe Express. A year when Kraftwerk’s imagination travelled from Paris to Vienna and back to Dusseldorf, to “meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie.” (They were really in Berlin making Low, “Heroes” and The Idiot.)
The train was a metaphorical means of escape. Away from Germany. Away from the Nazi associations they feared had attached themselves to Autobahn, and away from the hermetically sealed world of Radio-Activity (closing song – Ohm Sweet Ohm). The train fast-tracked them to a pan-European identity, and to a music that sounded more than ever like the gleaming future we would all soon live in.
And the counting? Another real-world, real-time reference — a shout out to the punks in London and New York. A Teutonic wuntoofreefaw! The very opposite of White Riot, the frantic energy of punk very deliberately lost in translation. A quote that doesn’t sound like one. Like an inversion of the moment a few years before, which sounded like a quote but wasn’t at all. What had been mistaken for Beach Boys-style “fun, fun, fun auf der Autobahn” was actually just “fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n” — the German for ‘driving’.
A perfect joke, but an accident. In 1977, though, the year of punk, they meant it. Man.
We are standing here,
Exposing ourselves.
That’s Kraftwerk, describing Kraftwerk.
But not only Kraftwerk. Also quite possibly everyone else who would live in the world that Kraftwerk were in the process of inventing.
They were reluctant performers, and were criticised for it. Rather than try to overcome the stiffness, though, they subsumed it into their performance. They played with it, affecting an artful blankness and turning surface into depth. Their featurelessness became their main feature.
If they were exposing themselves, they offered no sense of what those selves actually were.
The album was called Trans Europe Express, but Showroom Dummies dominates the aesthetic. As the train catapults us into modern life, Showroom Dummies shows us how that life might look. How it might feel. Kraftwerk convey catalogue perfection. Emotionlessly happy. On show in the shop window of our future.
Showroom Dummies says, we know. We stay still on purpose. We have deliberately become who you criticise us for being. It is meaningful. It is the first song Kraftwerk recorded in English, German (Wir sind Schaufentserpuppen), and French (Nous sommes les mannequins).
We can assume they wanted to be understood.
We look around,
And we change our pose.
That’s Kraftwerk, changing their language.
And not just their language, but also the language of pop. And, ultimately, the language of modern life, since life has become a performance, just as Kraftwerk said it would. Humans and machines have converged, and so have reality and image. The story from Autobahn to Computer World is the story of our move from passenger to personalities dissolved behind screens. Though perhaps, as Iggy said in 1977, we were always “under glass”.
Kraftwerk chart, predict and celebrate our changing role as modern life has happened around us, to us. Each change, each album, brought new poses, each deepening the idea of Kraftwerk, and therefore the idea of us.
It’s an idea that is entirely self-made, and which emerged from the scorched cultural earth of post-war Germany. No reference points to spark inspiration. Perhaps a re-animation of Weimar, or the discordant jolt of Stockhausen. Other than that, Kraftwerk imagined a new music from scratch, trapped in the assumptions of the outside world, hemmed in by others’ ideas of what Germany could be.
The punks talked of a Year Zero, and wore the verboten swastika, but they didn’t know the half of it. When your world is de-cultured, with only the landscape and the buildings and the technology and a blanked out history to inspire you, maybe that forces genuine originality. Maybe it’s that blankness that inspires the seductive, austere perfection that Kraftwerk made in 1977.
Invention, and reinvention, were Kraftwerk’s default setting.
We start to move,
And we break the glass.
We step out,
And take a walk through the city.
We go into a club,
And there we start to dance.
That’s Kraftwerk, becoming.
Morphing into real people. Going Nightclubbing (with Iggy again?). Breaking glass (with Bowie?). The Showroom Dummies escape their trap and go dancing. Doing what kids had always done and would continue to do, only now they would do that mostly to a soundtrack of Kraftwerk’s music and the music inspired by it.
Music such as that which came of out Detroit in the 1980s. Or from Manchester, in the shape of Joy Division, whose label was called Factory (perhaps because Kraftwerk means ‘powerplant’), and whose label boss Tony Wilson liked to proclaim that “the story of rock and roll is the story of small cities.” Small cities like Detroit and Manchester — and Dusseldorf — where the rhythm of mass production set the rhythm of life and therefore its music. Cities that are built around the call and response of the week and the weekend. Cities that housed both industry and its instinctive escape valve. Places where people go “automatic dancing” in the way that Kraftwerk would later picture us doing in The Robots.
Places where Showroom Dummies come to life.
We’re being watched
And we feel our pulse
That’s Kraftwerk, asserting their identity.
Asserting the human beat of their electronic blues.
Asserting the individuality of each of us as we perform for everyone else.
We are Showroom Dummies
We are Showroom Dummies
We are Showroom Dummies
We are Showroom Dummies
We are Showroom Dummies
We are Showroom Dummies
We are Showroom Dummies
We are Showroom Dummies
That’s Kraftwerk, repeating themselves.
Over and over and over. Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal.
For Kraftwerk, repetition is important, and deliberate. “If we can convey an idea with one or two notes” said Ralf Hutter, “it is better than to play a hundred or so notes.”
Simple is always best.
And so it is with words.
Since you got this far, would you mind going a little further?
Clicking “Recommend” below will help to share this article with other reader
Following us on Medium (below) would be much appreciated.
And we’re on Twitter too.
Thank you.
