The Man Machine (1978) Kraftwerk

Written by Adrian McLean

I’m not sure I could tell you how young I was when I first heard The Man Machine; only really that I was confused and terrified by the voices coming through the car stereo. The Robots felt, to my tiny mind, like a truly alien transmission. It’s minimalistic, yet richly textured with sounds more like submarine radars and hammers on sheet metal than any instrument on Earth. The repetition is soothingly hypnotic to me now; on first listen, it sounded like metal boots marching through Wandsworth to get me. 

I didn’t listen to the album again for years. When I did, it wasn’t just The Robots that moved me profoundly. Spacelab opens with an ascending C minor scale that sounds like blast doors opening, until the percussive bassline comes in with a propulsive forwards motion that carries you through into Metropolis. As much as I love every song on this album, Metropolis is easily my favourite. There is a strange melancholy that plays throughout the album and emerges at unexpected moments. It’s there in Spacelab, in the haunting melody that plays over the percussive interludes. In that song, it sounds like a transmission from space itself, lonely at first and gradually built upon with harmonies by the time it returns, dissolving into the end of the song. In Metropolis though, it’s everywhere. For a full minute and twenty seconds, synth lines rise and fall in harmonies that shift disconcertingly from minor into major, always undercut and falling back into uncertainty. It’s music stripped back to its cleanest fundamentals. Florian Schneider and Ralph Hütter’s training in classical music is clear - it’s reminiscent of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal prelude, recontextualised for the space-age.  

Anticipation builds to an unbearable point, until it suddenly dissipates into an industrial drumline. Metropolis is the first song that features the voice of Ralph Hütter without vocoder processing. Like many Kraftwerk songs, the lyrics feature a single word repeated - ‘Metropolis’ - and left open to all lines of verbal association. For five full minutes, the same melody descends over and over again, sometimes as a human voice and sometimes as pure synthetic noises. I mentioned Wagner, whose music is a recurring theme throughout Kraftwerk’s oeuvre, but an equally important touchstone is the cinema of Fritz Lang. Metropolis overtly references Lang’s film of the same name. The film is set in a dystopian megacity of the future, concerning the theme of workers’ rights in a hyper-Capitalist industrialised world. Metropolis - the song and the film - are for me the absolute centre of everything that Kraftwerk produced. For one, the film introduces the concept of the Maschinenmensch, or ‘robot-human,’ which Kraftwerk dedicates this entire album to exploring. It perfectly illustrates how Kraftwerk look both forwards, towards the possibilities of science-fiction, and backwards, into a pre-Nazi German identity that is utopian while still holding the seeds of dystopia. And the final title-card of the film forms the perfect summary of Kraftwerk’s artistic philosophy: ‘The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart.’ 

The next track is an unusual outlier in Kraftwerk’s discography for dealing explicitly with matters of the heart, and is probably their biggest hit (certainly their most covered song, including the brilliantly abrasive version on Big Black’s Songs About Fucking). The Model runs for half the length of each other song on the album, and again features Hütter’s endearingly shaky vocals. It’s playful, the original German version featuring an inside joke about a needy waiter in a local Düsseldorf club (‘Sie trinkt in Nachtclubs immer Sekt - korrr-ekt!’). It is a pastiche of the vainly consumeristic personality of ‘The Model,’ but it’s a pop song before anything else. 

If any song was to be the Metropolis’ counterpart - the emotional core to its conceptual core - it would be Neon Lights. Neon Lights showcases the mesmeric, trance-inducing repetition that Kraftwerk is best known for: over a metronomic beat, a simple twelve-bar melody loops. The vocals follow the synth lead, sketching a hazy, shimmering picture of Düsseldorf as the ur-metropolis. It’s uncanny that these lyrics (minimalistic as they are) were once celebrations of the bleeding-edge of urban modernity. Now, they seem nostalgic, a reminiscence on the neon signs that are quintessentially ‘retro’ to the modern eye. The song proceeds languidly, without urgency, until the midway point - it’s here that the group let full abstraction take the reins, the once tersely restrained rhythm section swirling and reverberating in circular patterns, building in density until they fade away. It’s one of Kraftwerk’s most overt moments of emotional release, and it feels like the cumulation of all the album’s relentless forward motion. 

It’s strange, then, that the closing track - The Man Machine - doubles backwards into ominous restraint. Musically, it always feels slightly jarring. Both thematically and in its staccato, minor-key rhythms, it’s a fitting bookend to opening track The Robots. After the celebratory coda of Neon Lights, though, it feels unexpectedly dark. Conceptually, it makes sense; it cements a major theme of the album as the tension between utopian futurism and its darker post-humanist undercurrent. The ‘man-machine’ in question, that of Lang’s Metropolis, is at once ‘semi-human’ and ‘superhuman,’ an imposter and the inevitable future. The song fades out without choosing a side. It’s unsatisfying, but intentionally so. 

The album, as a whole, projects a fully realised and sci-fi future; at the same time, it takes me back. Kraftwerk pay homage to Lang’s Metropolis and his Maschinenmensch; the models, nightclubs, and neon lights of 1970s Düsseldorf; even the European Space Agency’s very own short-lived Spacelab. All of these fantastical, futuristic things were, in truth, mundane. Even more, they were ephemeral things, all either of the past or soon to be consigned to it. It’s right, I think, that I remember being a child when I listen to this album. The album does not strive towards an existence outside of time to achieve its genuine timelessness. Rather, it speaks to the continually recurring state of change outside of our control, that shapes us all.