Kraftwerk are back. Not that they have come up with something new – no, they will play their old songs live in Düsseldorf (http://www.kraftwerk.com/concerts/index-concerts.html). Does the world need this?
If Miles Davis and Beethoven are the prototypical musical innovators then Kraftwerk were the perfect sham innovators. Their performances were all about perception (and deception) and not about content. Style dominated over music – form over content.
The idea of the great artist, who is inspired by transcendental scintillation, was of course out of fashion since the days of futurism and surrealism. Andy Warhol and pop-art laid it to rest for good. Roxy Music had already created a world of musical illusion. Brian Ferry could neither sing nor play but he had style. But Kraftwerk were also influenced by cybernetics. Kraftwerk called one of their albums „The Man-Machine“. This suggests an alleged or even desired symbiosis between nature and technology.
Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics in 1946. He first used it in public at a conference on the subject of „Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems“. Two years later, his seminal book „Cybernetics“ was published, in which he compared the human brain to a machine. Another influential idea which he proposed was that societal organizations do function like biological ones and both can be compared to machines again (Wiener, 1948).
This was in the heyday of behaviorism in psychology (at least in the USA). Behaviorists thought that human beings can be conditioned like animals. Their main influence was Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, who famously experimented with dogs. He showed that a dog can be conditioned to react to a logically unconnected trigger. In his famous experiment, he rang a bell each time food was presented to the dogs. After a while the dogs salivated when the bell rang even if no food was presented.
Wiener believed that the human system was more complex. Humans were intelligent animals after all. Intelligence needed a more complicated signal processing. But still there was the belief that the brain was a closed system which can be reproduced in a machine. Alan Turing as early as 1936 had specified his Turing Machine. In 1950, he proposed the Turing Test to decide whether a machine exhibits intelligent behaviour or not.
The metaphor of the human brain as an intelligent machine entered psychology with Neisser in 1976 when he published his book „Cognition and Reality“ . The book started what soon became known as the first cognitive revolution in psychology (Neisser, 1976).
Kraftwerk‘s music was strictly rational and „pure“. The „dirt“ which was introduced to music by human intuition and by improvising had to be purged. So, they not so much followed Stockhausen but made a recourse to Bach. He composed his fugues in a rational way, utilising the theory fully without breaking the rules, although nominally they were written for the praise of God. European music theory is indeed basically a mathematical doctrine.
Kraftwerk owed much to the machine music of futurism. Futurism too wanted to destroy the romantic indulgence in beauty. Kraftwerk like the punks that emerged in their wake broke the rules of society but not the rules of music theory. They were traditionalists in a musical context. Of course, the most members of the punk bands had but a basic understanding of the rules and thus could not go beyond it.
However, improvisation was ruled out, not only because of philosophic ideals but also because freedom is harder than compliance. Dizzy Gillespie once said:
I go for freedom, but freedom without organization is chaos. I want to put freedom into music the way I conceive it. It is free, but it’s organized freedom. You’ve got to take memory from the universe. Man will never organize anything as well as nature can. It’s perpetual, but so many things are happening that you can always discover something else in nature. (Dizzy Gillespie cited in Hester, 2012)
For improvisation not only a mastery of the instrument was needed but also a deep knowledge of the rules. You need to have a good crasp of the rules if you want to break them. It’s much easier to just follow the rules.
But there also was a shift from the mind to the body. From spirituality to cybernetics. Phenomenologists locate the acting subject in the human body. The body, for them, is an enabler but it is modified by the material world as well. Science tells us that the brain gets modified by practising skills. New synapses are built up, old ones die. Muscles get strengthen by body exercises or they shrivel by neglect. The social world shapes the body and the body in turn creates the opportunities to interact with the social world. The term used by Merleau-Ponty, who was strongly influenced by existentialism, is embodied experience. There is no dichotomy between mind and body; in fact body and world are one and the same.
The body was important for Kraftwerk. Not only because they also were keen cyclists. Turning away from the mind was a renunciation from the romantic idea of art as an idealistic, spiritual realm. The body and the electronics form a unity – a new, a higher being. Since the body – and the mind is for the existentialists part of the body – functions like a machine, it can be augmented by technology. Existentialism denounces the existence of an unconscious. Hence there are no body functions which cannot be explained by systems theory. With irrationality wiped out, the world became simpler and less threatening.
We perceive the world through our body – the mind is arguably located within our body – and what we perceive is our world. Hence someone who is perceived as a great artist, is a great artist. An artist who is perceived as dull can, according to phenomenologists, not be one. Hence hip critics in the early eighties could denounce Mark Knopfler as dull – even though he was ( and still is) a great guitar player – and Gang of Four as avant-garde.
Kraftwerk and their followers in techno and electronic body music replaced real feelings with artificial ones. The artificial ones were more pronounced than the real ones. Hence nature is dull and the artificial world is hip. Everyday life is humdrum and offers no kick. Electronic music after Kraftwerk has been monotonous and completely made out of loops. It was as boring as everyday life. But the artists was an artist and the office clerk was not. Life is full of loops. To live means to suffer, said Buddha. Listening to Kraftwerk can be suffering too. Kraftwerk fans pretend that it is fun. They really believe it. At least as long as they don’t see that the Autobahn they’re driving on is endless. Can someone pull the plug, please?
References
Hester, K. E. (2012) Bigotry and the Afrocentric “jazz” Evolution,
Neisser, U. (1976) Cognition and Reality
Spiegel Online (2012) Kraftwerk live in Düsseldorf http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/musik/kraftwerk-live-in-duesseldorf-a-866049.html
Wiener, N (1948) Cybernetics
Semantics and Transference 