Is the future already here?

Alexander Betancourt
Listen To This!
Published in
5 min readJan 25, 2020

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An album review on Kraftwerk’s seventh record: The Man Machine

The four members of Kraftwerk in The Man Machine photoshoot. One after the other, wearing the same formal and sober outfit.
Photo by: Günter Fröhling | Image from The Man Machine photoshoot

Whatever the specific context is when someone discover Kraftwerk (or just their music), will always result in strangeness. If your case is the opposite, then I’m happy that this text is traveling trough galaxies.

This strangeness it’s positive as negative in the extent you want, I’m afraid that I can not assure you if this characteristic will be your entrance key to this fantastic music group created in the 70’s, but, what I can assure is that the singularity its not the best that the band has to offer.

Luckily, for me and you, I have the good news that I’m not here for talking about Kraftwerk, instead of that, I’ll talk about their The Man Machine, a literal translation from German and the title with which it was marketed in most places in the world the Die Mensch-Maschine (1978), let’s not take this translation lightly because is more than accurate.

Four artificial appearance men posing, all them dressed with the same outfit that in combination with the paleness in their faces, demonstrates the concept in this record. Is the characteristic tricolor that predominates in the album, the cover an its paradigm, a powerful red-black-white in reference to the soviet propaganda as El Lissitzky’s work (influence also seen in other bands like Franz Ferdinand).

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Alexander Betancourt
Listen To This!
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Young mexican and science enthusiastic | Former music student and film fanatic | Literature is a great medium to express myself