Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak is familiar to most of my high-school-aged contemporaries; “Heartless”, the third track on the album, is a crowdpleaser at any spiked-seltzer-ridden social gathering. But Autobahn by Kraftwerk? Not so much. Unsurprisingly, there isn’t huge demand among seventeen year olds for experimental German EDM circa 1980.
But maybe these seventeen year olds should think again. “Heartless”, and the broader project of 808s—some might even venture to say West’s entire opus—would be impossible without Kraftwerk’s most revered electronic album.
Autobahn changed the music landscape completely, establishing the legitimacy of synth and autotune as main musical flavors; “Power, Corruption, and Lies” by New Order, “Violator” by Depeche Mode, and “The Sound From Way Out!” by Perry and Kingsley all tout this crucial influence. It even influenced post-punk bands like Joy Division and Gary Numan. However, in addition to your run of the mill twentieth-century electronic albums, Autobahn, in its elevation of autotune, has inadvertently inspired legions of contemporary rappers, like Kanye West and Future (as well as Playboi Carti, Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert, the list goes on). Not only does autotune allow for rappers and hip hop artists to develop a signature sound, it can add an additional layer of meaning to the lyrics. The robotic, eerily smooth, pitch-corrected sound can either contrast discussion of heavy emotions—almost putting a layer of thick meaning-proof glass in between the artist and their listener. Or, alternatively, autotune can complement rap’s typical lyrics about women, drugs, and money: vacuous topics to befit a computer-generated vacuous sound.
808s and Heartbreak specifically is a prime example of Kraftwerk’s aforementioned influence on rap. West’s fourth album uses autotune—which, to reiterate, never found its footing in popular music until Autobahn— to distort his voice as he chronicles his disillusionment with love, money, and newfound fame. But are there any further points of comparison, beyond this one element of form, autotune? How does the electronically-influenced form that both of these albums share provide additional meaning? Discovering deeper connections between the two albums necessitates deeper explorations of both the individual albums and the artists behind them.
Maybe I’m just a teenager, but I feel that Kanye West is relatively familiar to everyone. You might be acquainted with his ear-worm radio hits: “Gold Digger”, “Put On”, “Run This Town”, the list continues ad nauseam. You might follow his Twitter account: see my personal favorites below. Or, perhaps you’re aware of his brief toe-dip into the pool of public policy (his friendship with President Trump??????? Also below.)
The musical career of Kanye West has spanned decades. He began to produce beats for local artists in the mid-90s, but always dreamed of being a rapper; eventually, his dreams came to fruition and he released albums “College Dropout”, “Late Registration”, and “Graduation”. But 808s and Heartbreak was a radical departure from those albums West had created before—in sound, content, production, the list goes on— primarily because the album was created during a time fraught with strife for West. His fiancee broke off an engagement, while his mother died from complications related to cosmetic surgery (incredibly heartbreaking and ironic, and unpacked brilliantly throughout the album). Where before, his songs were party hits, 808s took pleasure in distorting and exposing the emptiness behind the glamour, models, and fast cars.
Kraftwerk, a German band formed in the late 60s, necessitates more basic context. It was created by Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter, both students at music school participating in the German experimental music/art scenes. Autobahn was one of their early albums, and the name references a freeway connecting Cologne and Bonne. It was the first of its kind in Germany, an unprecedented infrastructure development to accommodate increasingly popular interstate travel. Clearly, there’s meaning there: Autobahn, an album named after a major technological innovation, uses electronic instruments (like an analog synthesizer) to denote a more futuristic, mechanized world.
So: both artists use autotune and electric production to comment on the lack of closeness spurred by the futuristic glamour and newness of technology. In West’s case, it’s specifically celebrity culture— the excesses and follies of the one percent of the one percent. The rapidly developing technologies and consequent rapidly developing culture of the United States (in addition to the rapidly growing class divide, also partially predicated by tech) have created a media-steeped ruling class of sorts: the Kanye West’s, the Paris Hilton’s, the cult-worshipped young celebrities so rich they don’t know what to do with it. (Bling Ring, anyone?) West artfully rails against this culture that he’s so heavily involved in— in “Say You Will”, “Heartless”, and “Love Lockdown”, he makes thinly veiled allusions to his fiancée and her coldness, and his own/the collective feelings on relationships in general. Sex, lust, but never love, are sought after in this monotone world of constant dopamine and temporary pleasure. In “Amazing”, featuring Jeezy, West satirizes the inflated ego of himself and his rapper contemporaries: lyrics like “my reign is as far as your eyes can see, it’s amazing”, followed by a chorus of eight (!) “amazings” (of course it’s possible the entire thing is meant literally, which would be a different, perhaps more potent, satire of the album itself…)
It’s a teensy but harder to read between the lines of Autobahn, considering there’s no lyrics. But there’s certainly still commentary to be gleaned; because the medium (auto tune/electric production) was so groundbreaking at the time, the medium is the message (and yes, I know that’s not exactly how McLuhan intended that phrase, but for the sake of the situation, it fits.) Kraftwerk used instruments and melody to give a soundtrack to their rapidly developing city; while other 60s and 70s bands pushed the vocalists and guitarists to the fore, Kraftwerk made the Minimoog (a brand of analog synthesizer) the most important sound. In a 1981 interview, Ralf Hutter, one of the band’s founders, remarked that “as we live in the Rhine-Ruhr region, the music is influenced more by machines and the city than by rural concerns, and it reflects those elements.”
I encourage you to take a listen to both of these albums. Maybe one of them will be your cup of tea; maybe both; maybe neither. Regardless, it’s fascinating to compare two completely different albums, genres, and artists, and trace the influence of German experimentalism to today’s American popular culture.