Kraftwerk, German experimental group widely regarded as the godfathers of electronic pop music. The original members were Ralf Hütter (b. 1946, Krefeld, West Germany) and Florian Schneider (b. 1947, Düsseldorf, West Germany—d. 2020).
Hütter and Schneider met while studying classical music at Düsseldorf Conservatory in the late 1960s, and their early work with a five-piece band called the Organisation showed the influence of the German keyboard band Tangerine Dream. Adopting the name Kraftwerk (“Power Plant”), Hütter, Schneider, and a series of collaborators forged an austere sound and image as part of a small but highly influential cult of German bands who experimented with electronic instruments long before it was fashionable. The movement, dubbed “Krautrock” by British journalists, also included such innovative bands as Can, Faust, and Neu!, but Kraftwerk became the best known.
The foundation for Kraftwerk’s music was the sounds of everyday life, a concept first fully realized on the 22-minute title track of the Autobahn album (1974). Repetitious, monotonous, lulling, and entrancing, “Autobahn” became an unlikely hit in Europe and the United States (where it was played on commercial radio stations in severely edited form). Subsequent albums explored such subjects as radios and trains with a combination of childlike wonder and cold objectivity. The band revolutionized ideas about how a “rock” tour should look and sound by appearing in the United States in the guise of identical mannequins who performed their music exclusively on keyboards. The title of their album The Man-Machine (1978) epitomized the concept. Although the band recorded rarely in the 1980s and ’90s and virtually stopped touring, its music was a huge influence on New York hip-hop, particularly Afrika Bambaataa’s hit “Planet Rock”; Detroit techno dance music; Neil Young’s album Trans (1983); the collaborations between David Bowie and Brian Eno; and the synth-pop of Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, and countless others.
The group resumed a limited touring schedule in the early 2000s and released Tour de France Soundtracks (2003), their first album of original material in some 17 years. Minimum-Maximum, their first live album, appeared in 2005. Schneider’s departure from Kraftwerk was announced in early 2009, but the band continued to tour. In 2012 New York City’s Museum of Modern Art presented “Kraftwerk—Retrospective 12345678,” in which the band performed eight of its studio albums, beginning with Autobahn, over eight evenings. The exhibit later traveled to other museums, including Tate Modern in London, and it was the basis for a tour that took Kraftwerk to various venues around the world. A live recording made from several of the performances, 3-D: The Catalogue (2017), won a Grammy Award for best dance/electronic album. The band received a Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2014, and in 2021 it was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.