Kraftwerk


I have been to many many concerts, seen a lot of groups I grew up and knew every song by. Until now, I had not had the opportunity to see one of the groups I really wanted to see, one of the first groups whose music I can remember as far back as possible (before I was five). When I finally saw them at the Paramount, it was just as I expected.

Kraftwerk opened with Man Machine and proceeded to go through a slew of their hits that included Expo 2000, Tour de France, Vitamin, Autobahn, The Model, Neon Lights, Radioactivity, and Trans Europe Express.

Their first encore consisted of Numbers, Computerworld, It's More Fun to Compute, and Pocket Calculator.

Their second encore where they were replaced by robots consisted (naturally) of We are the Robots.

For their third encore, they Electrokardiogramm, Aerodynamik, Boing Boom Tschak/Musik Non-Stop.

Even though a lot of the music was preprogrammed, it was still great to hear parts of it live, especially in a great sound system. The mixes of course were quite novel and illustrated how their music has been so influential in a variety of forms of contemporary music today.

To pass their legacy on, I took my children with me to the show and they were awed by it (my daughter, who was turning five that night, liked most of the latter songs).

As I often say, Kraftwerk pioneered both the industrial and electronic music revolutions. Their incredible creativity and vision alone is worth reminscing about, and checking out live.


Music ramblings || Ram Samudrala || me@ram.org || April 26, 2004