Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution is a British documentary film released last year and available for sale on Amazon. It is a history of the evolution of the influential German electronic-music band, as well as that of German experimental music generally of the late 1960s and that strange hybrid period of jazz-electronic improvisation known (seriously) as "krautrock."
Well, this is the kind of thing certain geeks get so impatient to see we click the super-express-delivery option, cost be damned. I ripped the plastic open and put on my headphones the very day it arrived. It was a perfect balm, too: At three hours long, it was enough to take me safely cocooned in my world of bearded German music profs right through the Oscars, blissfully isolated from the day when the entire world becomes the United States.
It's not for the attention-challenged, this movie: Much of it consists of detailed analyses of early electronic recordings by some very knowledgeable music critics - including the brilliant Mark Prendergast, the Irish author of The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance - The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age, another nerd must-have - and a few unexplained jargon words like "motorik" and sequencer.
There are indeed more words than music, although it's missing any words at all from Ralph Huetter and Florian Schneider, the founding and driving members of Kraftwerk, who are notoriously reclusive and refuse interviews. So there's a hole at the centre of it. But there are fantastic images of the long-haired intellectuals in their dark Berlin coffee shops and communes under the shadow of the Wall, tweaking their fantastically complicated banks of black boxes, all knobs and wires.
And there are bits of film of very early live performances by Huetter and Schneider, who, like almost everybody in the scene they were a part of, were classically trained musicians (they met at the Duesseldorf conservatory).
Indeed, there was little distinction, when Kraftwerk first formed, among jazz and krautrock practitioners, between popular and classical music. At first these experimenters were seen as part of the tradition of Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, descendants of musique concrète and concert listening music, not dance music.
And it is exciting and reassuring to hear from both academic critics and media critics in this movie, sounding so alike, equally articulate and knowledgeable about John Cage and David Bowie, and the history of the Second World War. And - okay, this is where I'm going with this - it's so much more interesting than listening to the faux-proletarian hominess and the fey personal stories of the folk musicians constantly interviewed by our national broadcaster.
Not one of the musicians who were part of the electronic revolution had any interest in telling a personal story. They probably would have denied any interest in self-expression - maybe even in the self at all. That's why there were rarely lyrics in their early works. And why Kraftwerk themselves made themselves up as identical robots and mannequins and eventually retreated from public life almost altogether: They wanted to direct their audience's attention to music and ideas, not to personalities. They were anti-rock stars, the antithesis of the soulful blues or country singer.
That's the other admirable thing: They explicitly wanted to avoid copying American and British sounds and stances. Perhaps the most inspiring thing to me in the film is hearing Karl Bartos, a member of Kraftwerk from 1975 to 1991, say, "We were pretty much aware that we weren't raised in the Mississippi Delta." The goal of these West German musicians - who had grown up in a country still bristling with U.S. soldiers, and whose pop music was the blues and rock of GI bars - was to create their own style, a sound that reflected their national culture and their musical heritage, not to copy.
It made me keenly wish I could hear, maybe just once, a Canadian pop musician say this. Imagine how shocking it would be to hear Serena Ryder proudly say: "I am not from the Mississippi Delta, nor do I want to be." That sentence reminded me of the irritation I feel every time I turn on CBC's Radio 2 - and I do try to listen to it, I really do - and I hear another young guy from Brampton, Ont., singing a cowboy song with a guitar, in a careful reproduction of an Alabaman accent, or another young woman from Halifax with a piano, dropping her g's and her r's in an impeccable Kentucky drawl.
Why do so many of our pop musicians dream of singing around a campfire in a mythical American desert? Why don't we even try to create a sound that is our own, that reflects modern life in this place and climate, and sung in our own accents? (Where is our Zodiac Free Arts Lab?) And why does our national broadcaster, which claims to be so proudly promoting the Canadian, promote primarily the Canadian art that is a slavish imitation of another country's very distinct and identifiable aesthetic?
Anyway, you can see a preview of the Kraftwerk movie at veoh.com.