Call Them the Beatles of Electronic Dance Music (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Call Them the Beatles of Electronic Dance Music (1997)

nytimes.com

14 pointsTomte16 comments

For anyone who doesn't want to read the article to find out who, they're talking about Kraftwerk.

Thanks for saving me the click.

"we are the robots" is one of my favorite songs of all time.

I was at that concert. It was the best concert i have ever been to. Everything you usually think of as essential for a great concert, like stage energy, and the personalities of the band, was entirely absent. Instead it was Minimalistic, focused, an exercise in precision. It was probably closest to a religious ceremony. It made you "get" songs you didn't think was that special before.

The best part was when they left the stage and left only four displays, showing images of their robots during "we are the robots". Then as the song ran out 5 minutes later, the screens slowly lowered and revealed the 4 real robots back lit. The crowd went nuts and they started the German version of the song.

I have seen them 5 times, all amazing, but that first time will be with me forever.

Kraftwerk is not dance music. Yes people have tried:

https://youtu.be/z6sQy5cd8ic

https://youtu.be/jdjEqP6mhV4

EDM began with Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love” in 1977. At 2:30 in the video here he describes the moment the song came together:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/10/giorgio-morode...

Drum machines go back to Sly and the Family Stone in 1971 or George McRae “Rock Your Baby” in 1973.

“Popcorn” by Hot Butter was not dance music. John Michael Jarre was not dance music. And Kraftwerk was not dance music.

Little known: DJ Kool Herc invented breakbeats (please do watch this video):

https://youtu.be/Hw4H2FZjfpo

As EDM becomes ever more narrowly regimented, more and more of its antecedents will be considered outside the genre.

>Kraftwerk is not dance music.

It's an American thing. Popular US audiences after having discovered electronic/dance music in the mid 2000s (after 20+ years of it being huge in Europe [1]), they call everything "EDM".

Stuff for which Europe has names for decades, and has split into 10s of genres (from techno, house, and trance, to garage, 2-step, hardstep, dubstep, goa-trance, big beat, and dozens of others). is all bundled under the "EDM" moniker. Whereas in Europe, if used at all, the term EDM would refer to the BS played at big festivals...

[1] Of course Techno and House originated in the US, but compared to Europe they have been fringe there for the longest time, it was all rock/country/soul/hip hop in the US as far as popular audiences are concerned. In the US those genres were only for clubs (and not that many at that), not charts...

I remember artists like Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Orbital , etc. being called IDM (intelligent) dance music circa the late 90s, followed by “Electronica”, I guess they just merged the two terms.

In the US, the term EDM is also used mostly to refer to the BS played at big festivals.

But no matter how you define the terms, Kraftwerk is not dance music. They are awesome, and pioneers of electronic music. Just not dance music.

That's really not true. People were definitely dancing to Kraftwerk in clubs in the late 70s and 80s. I know because I was one of them.

Those albums are only "not dance music" because they don't have the stereotypical disco cliches of the era. But they were very popular for dancing. And they were absolutely influenced by disco, because the band spent a lot of time in disco clubs after recording sessions.

By the time you get to Numbers on Computer Love the techno/disco influence is a lot more obvious, and it's a real stretch not to call that track core EDM. And the remixes on The Mix are straight-down-the-line early EDM.

Kraftwerk are unusual for creating a unique style that blended elements of disco/techno with proto-synth pop, classical music, and a weirdly ironic modernist Schlager.

Most EDM is more either more formulaic or it lacks the strong melodies and inspired feel for structure and form that makes Kraftwerk stand out. They put it all together, made it work, added the kind of branding and imagery that's usually labelled "iconic", and eventually updated it with video to turn it into a kind of conceptual art project - which is why they've spent as much time performing in big galleries as at festivals.

> Most EDM is more either more formulaic or it lacks the strong melodies and inspired feel for structure and form that makes Kraftwerk stand out

Those qualities that make Kraftwerk stand out are what sets them apart from the genre of EDM! From a pre-2010 USian perspective, coldtea's comment is on point.

But looking up the term, apparently it does now refer to more than just one genre. But that itself feels like a forced result of commercialization - Wikipedia: By the early 2010s, the term "electronic dance music" and the initialism "EDM" was being pushed by the American music industry.

Unfortunately it's also exclusionary to electronic music that isn't primarily intended for dancing, which is why you're arguing over whether people were dancing to Kraftwerk.

I include a video of people (heroically) trying to dance to Numbers in my first post above, as evidence that Kraftwerk is not dance music.

You're welcome to upload your own video, dancing to Numbers. We'd love to see it. I mean that sincerely.

There's also Steve Reich's[1] "It's Going to Rain"[2] and "Come Out"[3], composed in 1965 and 66 respectively.

While you'd never hear either of those at dance clubs, they're much closer to the roots of EDM and other forms of electronic music than Kraftwerk is.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Reich

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vugqRAX7xQE

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0WVh1D0N50

"Call Them the Beatles of Electronic Music"

Fixed that for you.

Kraftwerk were absolutely going for the comparison, which is why they were a quartet, while only two of them really wrote and produced the music.

Nihilists

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