COMPUTER WORLD [AKA: COMPUTERWELT]

First, a little background: I remember becoming aware of this album way back in 1981 - the pop radio station where I lived played the track "Numbers" several times, probably for its novelty value: a song that counted a bunch of numbers in a robotic voice set to a sequenced synthetic melody eerily similar to that heard the prior year on Paul McCartney's synth fiasco "Temporary Secretary" (which I loved). But the seed was planted. The next time I went to a record store, I saw Kraftwerk's album "Computer World" and almost decided to buy it. Eventually, I did buy it.

Back then, I was in junior high school. Computers were new, a little bit alien, and kind of fascinating. Kraftwerk latched on to our collective curiosity about a world with computers. Today their involvement in our life seems obvious, even inevitable, but back then it was a big question mark. Isaac Asimov and Alan Parsons were wondering if the man/machine relationship would really yield the utopian life the optimists anticipated. I myself composed an admittedly naive but nonetheless sincere collage piece where I questioned the wisdom of letting computers take too much time out of our lives. Kraftwerk, meanwhile, seemed to tell us, hey, don't worry, be happy.

That is the vibe I get from Computer World. It presents man and machine working together in harmony, with the most relaxed and playful melodies you'd ever expect coming out of what sounds like a vintage 1980s Nintendo system.

My epiphany came when I was driving with my family in the car. We'd had a fun day, and we went out after dinner to get some frozen yogurt. I was driving, my wife was on her iPhone, my daughter was in the back seat on her Kindle, and Kraftwerk was on the stereo. As the music played, I heard the blips and beeps from my family's electronic devices, and rather than feel the Techno-Fear that so many of my contemporaries feel upon realizing that their families are spending way too much time staring at computer screens, I felt an odd sort of Harmony going on. The music on the stereo and the incidental sounds coming out of their devices were almost "jamming" with each other! Our lives and the machinery that kept us entertained blipped and beeped in the same kind of rhythmic harmony as the music I was hearing. It all seemed to fit together, and it reinforced an idea I've held for a while: Technology is not our enemy. Technology is as beautiful as a painting - or a piece of music. It's all part of the same wellspring of human ideas.

Ok, Ok, not very politically correct but I'm just relating what I felt. This album really just reinforced some ideas I had first encountered in my favorite tome Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, that the relationship between man and machine need not be any different from the relationship between man and "nature", because "nature" also encompasses "machines". It's all just different manifestations of the same "stuff". And I will always remember this, and will always associate that discovery with this album.

In a historical context, Kraftwerk, who had pretty much invented synth-pop during the preceding 5 years, presented this album almost as a "hey, remember us?" kind of gesture. The music they had pioneered had influenced bands that were all over the radio by then. Although this album really broke no new ground like Trans Europe Express had, it gave the Kraftwerk guys a well-deserved opportunity to do a "victory lap". It's ironic in this light that I first perceived them as a novelty band in 1981 - they were probably the pioneers of half the styles I was hearing on the radio from my favorite pop stars at the time.

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