Kraftwerk -- Radioactivity

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It's been trending on Twitter for a lot of the day today, but Florian Schneider, one of the founders of the legendary electronic music band Kraftwerk had passed away some time after his birthday last month, it was announced.

At the same time that I was getting into Japanese pop music, I was also developing my interest in pop music in general thanks to music videos and radio. However as a subset of this, technopop was also on my Like radar. It all started with Yellow Magic Orchestra and then it spread to New Wave music.

In the beginning of the 1980s, it was folks like Gary Numan, The Human League and then later on, it was New Order which became a staple on the dance floor in the discos. Man, was New Order danceable!

And I found out that Kraftwerk, which started up in 1970, had influenced all of these artists including YMO and whole genres such as hip-hop, techno and club music. In fact, after hearing the name for so long, I finally got to know a bit about Schneider, Ralf Hutter, Wolfgang Flur and Karl Bartos because of YMO.

Back in junior high school, during my lunch break, I had gone to the library (yep, instead of playing sports, I enjoyed reading books like a geek) and tried a record which had tracks of late 1960s computer music, as it was called. It was just tracks of weird bleeps and bloops. However, YMO and Kraftwerk illustrated to me that music made with synthesizers and samplers didn't need to sound like aural Dadism. As I would later find out, Yellow Magic Orchestra made their initial technopop as some experimental fun of filtering other genres of music (exotica, surf rock, etc.) through those fascinating machines. My impression of Kraftwerk through my early listenings to them was that the band was reaching for something crystalline, futuristic and elegant...but catchy, such as their 1974 "Autobahn".

Finding out more about Kraftwerk was during my second stint in Japan between 1994 and 2011. "Trans Europe Express" from 1977 was another song that I discovered, and from that, I could understand how 1980s bands such as the ones that I mentioned above got their mojo. Incidentally, there's something very soothing about how the members sing "TRANS...EUROPE...EXPRESS" over and over just like the way the rhythmic clacking of a Tokyo subway would often lull me into slumber as it took me home at night.

"Tour de France" from 1983, aside from the giggle-sparking panting (yes, I'm sure that it's all about riding the bikes up that hill) throughout, seems to be the ideal theme song for the utopian city of the future with lots of soaring buildings of weird shapes and angles. I met up with a couple of friends in Ebisu for dinner one night (one of whom looks just like a young Schneider, although I've never told him this) and the one not looking like Schneider just when on and on about "Tour de France" to the extent that I had to find out about the song.

My apologies and thanks for your patience. On hearing the news about Schneider's passing today, I ended up listening to their 1976 single "Radioactivity", a haunting and contemplative song that is translated in Japanese as "Houshanou"（放射能）.

One reason for this is that I saw Kraftwerk's participation in the No Nukes 2012 event following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I was totally absorbed in their performance on stage which included adjusting the lyrics to bring in the city of Fukushima in their intoned list of cities that have been affected by nuclear accidents. Additional Japanese lyrics were provided by Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）from YMO. Incidentally, the concert was held at Makuhari Messe, not too, too far away from my home in Ichikawa.

Indeed, it is amazing that a good chunk of the music that I ended up listening to and even danced to during my high school and university days was inspired by Kraftwerk. Certainly I'm grateful for them to provide a light to YMO, one of the entry points for me in terms of my love for pop music in my second home away from home.