Kraftwerk at the Nuits de Fourvière: enjoy the Autoroute!

A decade ago, Kraftwerk's concert at Nuits Sonores was already considered an unprecedented event. How else to describe the arrival of this unique German band at Nuits de Fourvière? Especially if it's to review 50 years of musical creation. An anniversary with somewhat shifting contours because, in reality, Kraftwerk's two founders have been operating under this name since the early 1970s. But in 1974, they made a fundamental shift. Until then considered an avant-garde group, to say the least elitist, the Florian Schneider/Ralf Hütter duo, regularly enriched, took advantage of technological developments and the acquisition of new synthesizers to reset everything. The ability these instruments offered to transform themselves into demiurges to create new sounds from scratch allowed them to lay the foundations of Industrial Volksmusik (popular industrial music, the latter qualifier being all the more important). The idea is to reflect with an objective coldness, and in some ways to sublimate, the industrial world of the Ruhr. And what better way to evoke the Ruhr than the highways that cross it? It was in fact in a car that Kraftwerk had the idea for the founding piece that was Autobahn , whose stage project is therefore celebrating its half-century. The piece may, to the layman, seem all the more experimental since, although there will be a version formatted for radios, it originally lasts 22 minutes and occupies the entire first side of the album of the same name. But it turns out to be very accessible and melodic, as will be most of the group's flagship pieces. The melody of the piece is indeed reminiscent of the Beach Boys' Fun, Fun, Fun , Kraftwerk being regularly described as the "Beach Boys of Düsseldorf" or the "industrial Beach Boys".

Royal Way

Above all, the concept of Autobahn goes far beyond music: the motorway, a German invention, is here a metaphor (especially when the group synthetically recreates the sound of cars speeding along at full speed) for technological evolution, an idealistic road towards technical progress and therefore the future, as attractive as it is terrifying. Kraftwerk will also focus a lot on writing about means of transport ( Trans-Europe Express will be another of their hits), as if it were a question of anticipating, from its most basic manifestation, Paul Virilio's theories on speed as transformative of our societies. But Autobahn is also a journey, which sets to music the monotony of a motorway journey, particularly when crossing the Ruhr, as well as the diversity of the landscapes crossed, notably through the repetitiveness of the music and the lyrics ( “Wir fahren auf der Autobahn” , or “we drive on the motorway” , because in fact, when you drive on the motorway, that’s all you do). The highway of kif, as the youth of the time did not say, is, from then on, for Kraftwerk a royal road to success, just as for electronic music, which will largely borrow the path cleared and drawn by the German group. And for Kraftwerk, a royal road to success which will never stop exploring technology and its dangers ( Radioactivity , 1975), predicting transhumanism ( The Man-Machine , 1978) and the digitalization of the world ( Computer World , 1981). One wonders whether, by revolutionizing the music of its time, Kraftwerk did not, in an involuntarily performative gesture, change the world.

Kraftwerk – July 21 at the ancient theater of Fourvière