How Kraftwerk’s 22-Minute Song “Autobahn” Became an Early Masterpiece in Electronic Music (1975)

It takes about five hours to dri­ve from Düs­sel­dorf to Ham­burg on the Auto­bahn. Dur­ing that stretch, you can lis­ten to Kraftwerk’s album Auto­bahn sev­en times — or if you pre­fer, you can loop its epony­mous open­ing song thir­teen times. For it was “Auto­bahn,” more so than Auto­bahn, that changed the sound of music around the world in ways we still hear today. “Ger­many was sud­den­ly on the musi­cal map,” writes the Guardian’s Tim Jonze. “David Bowie – who used to ride the auto­bahn while lis­ten­ing to the record – moved to Berlin and went on to make the elec­tron­i­cal­ly influ­enced Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. Bri­an Eno relo­cat­ed to the rur­al vil­lage of Forst to record with the influ­en­tial avant-garde band Har­mo­nia.” Soon would come the elec­tron­ic pop of Ultra­vox, DAF and the Eury­th­mics, fol­lowed by Don­na Sum­mer and Gior­gio Moroder’s flood­gate-open­ing “I Feel Love”.

Not a bad pop-cul­tur­al coup for, as Jonze puts it, “a 22-minute 43-sec­ond song about the Ger­man road net­work.” At the time of its release in ear­ly 1975, Kraftwerk had put out three full albums, but what would become their sig­na­ture Teu­ton­ic-elec­tron­ic sound had­n’t quite tak­en shape. But it was already clear that their work took its inspi­ra­tion from twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry moder­ni­ty, a sub­ject of which no sin­gle work of man in their home­land could have been more evoca­tive than the Auto­bahn.

With its ori­gins in the Weimar Repub­lic and its long stretch­es with­out a speed lim­it, the Ger­man free­way net­work is inter­na­tion­al­ly regard­ed as a con­crete sym­bol of total per­son­al free­dom, and total per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty, with­in a high­ly rule-respect­ing cul­ture. To the young mem­bers of Kraftwerk, who often drove the Düs­sel­dorf-Ham­burg sec­tion, it held out the promise of free­dom.

So did the then-new Min­i­moog syn­the­siz­er, which cost as much as a Volk­swa­gen at the time, but offered the chance to make music like noth­ing the pub­lic had ever heard before. “Auto­bahn” cap­tured the imag­i­na­tions of lis­ten­ers every­where with not just its elec­tron­ic effects, but also the incon­gruity of their com­bi­na­tion with instru­ments like the flute (a holdover from Kraftwerk’s ear­li­er com­po­si­tions) and vehic­u­lar sounds evoca­tive of a gen­uine road trip — all assem­bled at what would then have seemed a hyp­not­i­cal­ly expan­sive length for a pop song. Lit­tle did even the hippest lis­ten­ers of the mid-sev­en­ties, such as the Amer­i­cans tuned into ear­ly free-form FM sta­tions where no cor­po­rate pro­gram­ming rules applied, know that they were hear­ing what Jones calls “the point where elec­tron­ic pop music tru­ly began.” All car trips run out of road even­tu­al­ly, but human­i­ty’s jour­ney into the pos­si­bil­i­ties of high-tech music shows no signs of approach­ing its end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Psy­che­del­ic Ani­mat­ed Video for Kraftwerk’s “Auto­bahn” (1979)

Kraftwerk Plays a Live 40-Minute Ver­sion of their Sig­na­ture Song “Auto­bahn:” A Sound­track for a Long Road Trip (1974)

How Kraftwerk Made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Hear the Evo­lu­tion of Elec­tron­ic Music: A Son­ic Jour­ney from 1929 to 2019

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.