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)
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.
