Detroit

The earliest Kraftwerk records weren't exactly made in a void - Kraftwerk and Kraftwerk 2 bear some obvious rock hallmarks that depreciated significantly as their career unfolded. Those albums are loosely connected to similarly minded experimentalists in the then-burgeoning krautrock scene, who were, like Kraftwerk, enamored with the nihilistic proto-punk of the Stooges and the MC5. That those two bands hailed from Detroit, a city that toiled away to the ingrained rhythms of industrial machinery from the then-thriving auto industry, was telling. The march to work, soundtracked by the precision-tooled cadence of pistons and parts being methodically slotted into place, has often been summoned up as a common metaphorical motif to describe Kraftwerk's steely stomp through music history.

The two Detroit bands that initially influenced the German pioneers helped usher in one of those wonderfully circuitous pieces of pop folklore. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider carefully amassed piles of electronic equipment in the early 1970s, initially producing the largely instrumental Ralf and Florian (1973), then slowly letting their pop sensibilities take hold on Autobahn (1974). The pulsing beat that drives Autobahn’s title track finds beauty in the colorless monotony of a long trip down a vast expanse of German road, and planted the seeds for the relentless motorik-influenced beat of Detroit techno that would follow several decades later.

In 1980, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May were three African American kids finishing up high school together in the Detroit suburb of Belleville. Together, they discovered the music of Kraftwerk, Funkadelic and the Yellow Magic Orchestra, and made nascent stabs at assimilating those influences into something new. Atkins and May made initial inroads into the Detroit scene as DJs, then began making records. It’s Atkins who is credited with coining the descriptor “techno,” and his work with the band Cybotron—-particularly on tracks like “Clear” and “Techno City”—-helped kickstart the instantly recognizable sound of the genre. “They were so stiff, they were funky,” said techno pioneer Carl Craig, when asked to describe his infatuation with the band that cast such a long shadow over the Detroit techno scene.

Atkins, Saunderson and May borrowed heavily from Kraftwek’s 1981 opus Computer World, which bears all the trappings of a classic techno release, albeit a few years before the genre really took hold. Techno also leaned heavily on futuristic, Blade Runner-esque themes, that were analogous to Kraftwerk’s imagining of a possible world held enthrall to the personal computer. But they were also a band that warned of technology’s inherent dangers, and preempted many of the common causes adopted by anti-nuclear protesters in the ‘80s (and, later, the environmental movement) on Radio-Activity (1975). The title track of that album has become a terrifyingly potent centerpiece to the band’s live shows, with a solemn, monotonous voice intoning the names of locations commonly associated with nuclear power ("Tscernobyl/Harrisburg/Sellafield/Hiroshima") over and over.

England

The Detroit musicians tore into the form and function of tracks from Trans-Europe Express (1977) and The Man-Machine (1978) for inspiration, pulling out the guts of tracks like "Europe Endless" and "Neon Lights" and molding them for their own purposes. "Neon Lights" even preempted the trance techno boom that originated in Kraftwerk’s native Germany at the beginning of the 1990s. But in the provinces of England, a group of loosely connected musicians were listening to Kraftwerk in a totally different light. Bands like Ultravox, the Human League, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode were picking up suddenly affordable synths and using tracks at the poppier end of Kraftwerk’s catalog for inspiration. Ultravox even stole some of the skinny-tie style from the cover shot of The Man Machine (1978). The inherent humor in tracks like “The Model” and “The Robots” were certainly acknowledged by these bands, but so was Hütter and Schneider’s trick of forgoing the need to include a lyrical hook in the chorus, instead letting some infernally catchy synth lines pick out the melody. It's not unusual to find people "singing" along to instrumental passages from Kraftwerk's oeuvre.

Many bands from the New Romantic movement that followed these groups also borrowed liberally from Kraftwerk, with keyboards pushed to the fore and futuristic themes explored (see: Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys” and Spandau Ballet’s synth-heavy "To Cut a Long Story Short"). David Bowie was also an important figure to the New Romantic bands, bringing that Detroit-like loop of influence to the fore once again. Bowie often cited Kraftwerk as a hugely important band, naming “V-2 Schneider” on “Heroes” after Florian, causing Kraftwerk to return the favor by namedropping Bowie and Iggy Pop in the lyrics to "Trans-Europe Express."

While the New Romantic bands troweled on thick layers of makeup, an unassuming man named Tim Berners-Lee toiled away in an office somewhere at CERN. Berners-Lee created a program named ENQUIRE during his time at the organization, which utilized an early form of what would come to be known as hyperlinks (then named hypertext). ENQUIRE was finished in the latter half of 1980, just as Kraftwerk were putting the finishing touches to Computer World. The beatific “Computer Love” from that album, which remains one of the most beautifully refined embodiments of the central Kraftwerk aesthetic, imagined a possible world where a phone line could connect and communicate with a computer.

It’s not known whether Berners-Lee was aware of Kraftwerk, or New Romantics, or Detroit techno (although someone should really ask him). But he didn’t leave his work at CERN unfinished, and by 1989 he had merged hypertext with a nascent version of the Internet that the organization was testing, leading to the invention of the World Wide Web. Curiously, just as technology shoved a very real embodiment of the world that Kraftwerk had imagined into view, Messrs. Hütter and Schneider retreated from the public eye, only surfacing to release the occasional record and to indulge in bouts of retro-futurist themed touring. Many members have come and gone from the band over the years, but it was significant news when Schneider announced his departure at the tail end of 2008. Hütter still continues to perform and record with the band, although the gaps between releases remains infernally long.

New York

If there is one album from Kraftwerk’s catalog that had the widest impact, it would most likely be fingered as Trans-Europe Express. The glacial “Europe Endless” is one of the most perfect introductions to any record in the Kraftwerk vault, and demonstrates their knack for slowly folding in rhythms and counter melodies, letting the song rise and fall, creating a gently repetitive lullaby. The album was a shift away from the eccentric excesses of Autobahn and the conceptual horror-pop of Radio-Activity, with Hütter and Schneider lulling into trance-like patterns and allowing some overt humor to seep into their music for the first time (“Showroom Dummies”). Intriguingly, the album was significantly less successful on its release than the more experimental Autobahn, but like many records of great influence, it reached all the right people at exactly the right ti

In the South Bronx, one man was studying Trans-Europe Express intently, ultimately using it to record a song that would cast a huge influence on hip-hop, house and trance. Afrika Bambaataa had already been turned onto the emerging hip-hop scene by parties staged by DJ Kool Herc and Kool DJ Dee, although the genre didn’t have a name back then. In fact, Bambaataa is credited with coining the term “hip-hop,” and he released one of the first recorded embodiments of the genre on the single “Jazzy Sensation,” which came out on Tommy Boy in 1981. But it was Bambaataa’s savvy melding of two Kraftwerk songs—-the drifting melody of “Trans-Europe Express” and the stomping drum pattern of “Numbers”—-that really established hip-hop as a potent force.

"Planet Rock" was the single that merged those two components and, like much of Kraftwerk’s catalog, it manages to be both of its time and inherently timeless. The rhyming may sound slow by modern standards, and a few of the samples are clunky and strung together without much thought for how they impact on the integral workings of the song, but Bambaataa’s innate understanding of pop structure and his eye for innovation paid dividends. The song is another demonstration of the considerable influence uptight, white, European musicians had over a generation of African American kids in North America in the early '80s, providing further proof that pop often moves in mysterious ways. The societal gulf between Bambaataa and Hütter/Schneider was considerable, yet common ground was forged, connections were made, and history unfolded.

Incredibly, the "stiffness” Kraftwerk possessed also helped birth one of the great dance crazes of the ‘80s, which also had its roots deeply embedded in the New York scene that Bambaataa emerged from. Breakdancing began in the 1970s when gangs of kids in the South Bronx figured out a series of increasingly inventive dance moves, which drew heavily on the impossible elasticity of their minds and bodies. Hip-hop became the staple diet of breakdancers looking to show off their latest moves, but Kraftwerk surfaced again in this scene, with many dancers drawn to the pounding beats concocted within their infamous Kling Klang studio. “Tour de France” remains a staple breakdancing tune, and the merging of the two cultures was immortalized in the movie Breakin’ (1984), in which a dancer throws down to the song. Like many others before them, the breakdancers were naturally drawn into the world of Hütter and Schneider, whose influence on contemporary culture easily equals that of Jagger/Richards and Lennon/McCartney.

A box-set of Kraftwerk's remastered albums, titled The Catalogue, will be released on Mute/EMI on November 17.