In 1981 mentioning computers in song lyrics felt done. That was mostly due to those ones I started with, the popsters with ditties about tyrannical machine overlords, impersonal number identities or surveillance. To be Kraftwerk and call your album Computer World after Computer Games had blazed up the pop parade seemed as naff as it could get and it easily could have seemed that influencers of Bowie, Gary Numan and Eurodisco now looked as saurian as Led Zeppelin. The cover was a hard yellow picture of the band's heads appearing in the monitor of a blocky old computer terminal. Elsewhere they staffed the industrial looking machines of an unpronouncable German electro brain, in plastic toupees and robot expressions. Very Devo.
But not even Devo came close to the nightmare of the future that Kraftwerk were proposing. Yes, the synth-o-march of the title track bagged entities like Interpol and the FBI into a forbidding list of corporate identities and chants of "business, numbers, money, people" and then, "crime, travel, communication, entertainment. The arrangement was subdued and murky in opposition to the sound of Man Machine and certainly Trans-Europe Express. It sounded like music lit by a burglar's torch. Apart from the luminous riff that sounded more like a company jingle than a pop hook the music tramped like a battalion of sanitised officeworkers, not faceless mercentile robots but everyday white collars, pretty people who counted your cash or refused your dole payment, the world, in fact, as it was. Kraftwerk aren't warning us against a bleak future but describing where we were.
Pocket Calculator's riff sounds the most like a lot of the UK synthpop that surrounded the record. It's the kind of bright and boppy major key figure that could easily be imagined on a guitar as a synth. Around it the electronics squeak, snarl, pop and snap. The narrator is the operator of his pocket calculator, adding subtracting etc. as well as pushing the little tune button. But what feels like an optimistic jingle about portable technology is more about the pervasion of it. Little calculators weren't new at the time (I'd had several at school in the seventies) and were long normalised as a means of quick number work. It's the numbers that are going to work, here, as their users increasingly depend on them. The instrumental outro suggests the spread of this relationship, it's toy upbeat smile increasingly sinister.
Next we hear from those numbers themselves, beginning with a wobbly robot voice German chanting from one to four. We also hear the count in Japanese, English, Italian, and Russian. There's a percussion track but the synth is chromatic, almost as random as a sample and hold setting but clearly intentional. It is the sound of numbers working around us, in the circuitry, through the phone lines, in the shadows and obscure corners of our daily administration. It merges into the restatement of the title track as a quieter but more assured instrumental. No words needed. The effect has taken and our world is different and will not think to turn back.
The old side two begins with what in 1981 felt like overstatement as a lonely citizen uses computers to connect. He calls a number for a data date. How virtual that might be is up to your imagination. The same blend of clavinet harshness and ringing high keyboards in this modal music intensifies the bleakness of the image. The vocals, as with most of them on this album, are renedered a step back from hard clairty by going through a delay with a very short, metallic echo. The human voice doesn't come a lot colder than this. Most ot the track is instrumental as the imagined ritual plays out as part of the new way of living. It is quietly crushing.
Home Computer's riff is the darkest one on this dark record. Thick, staccato bass sliced from somewhere in the minor scale and repeated in a pulse. There is a brighter sounding counter riff, opened up to an major arpeggio, but it isn't there to provide light. "I program my home computer, beam myself into the future." That's the lyric. And you get four of those. Mostly it's the blunt bass riff, here and there descanted bya higher keyboard or interupted by the prettier counter theme. If there are games on this home computer they are relegated to breaks; you go to work and you come home to more work. And that's it forever. A rising bubbly figure adds another phase but it just sound like more programming. The by now typical second half or so of instrumental features the third rising figure punctuated by harsh electronic snares and a stylised phone ring.
It's More Fun To Compute is the final stage as the robotic user chants the title as a harsh distant electronic scream on the synth sounds. Riffs or musical themes are liberally recycled from the previous track to emphasise the transformation that has happened in the digital cocoon. There is a lugubrious restatement of the Home Computer theme on a legato string-style synth and the effect is of lamentation. We have reached this point because we couldn't turn back or stop when there was newness to make us better. Finally (after four of its six minutes of instrumental) the percussion ceases and we are left drifting in the dark with the lament. End.
So, in 1981, the idea of Kraftwek doing this was an, "oh. come on." Wasn't that just like Queen doing their punk song back in '77? But that's nothing like the album Kraftwerk produced as soon as you listened to it. The cover art showed them as mannequin-like servants of the machine and the songs were about teh absorption of humanity into digital information flow but there was not the slightest sigh of gimmick to be had. If anything, they scaled the electronics down to concentrate on delivering a message where the form of the lyrics and structure of the arrangements said more than videos of them bouncing around in sci-fi costumes. This wasn't about doing the robot on Space Station Alpha it was about life in 1981. It was dark and achingly melancholy. We weren't becoming machines, just getting used to serving them.
I think there's less to be had from asking how well they predicted the future, point for point, than in considering how the culture at first absorbed the notion to the point of becoming indistinguishable from it. This is not all bad - human connection is the same as it was with the internet (just heavily amplified) - but when it is bad it is scary. And that's way before you get to the dark web. The trust in the con has also been amplified and scammers have long worked on the same principles as the advertising industry. We buy the scam with the knowledge of the scam; even if we don't respond to it there is pleasure in acknowledging the attempt. As for sex, it went from text-only spontaneous erotica, to torrid IRC autopornography, to online porn entering the mainstream and dating sites hanging galleries of personal fiction with endless variety. And the more we think of ourselves as being at the controls the deeper inside the great buzzing and beeping control box we are. If Kraftwerk didn't quite get the details right a mere twenty years before it changed then who among us shall point the finger?
Back in 1981 the outfit that let the world know that pop music did not have to be an amped up 60s rock band but could continue to innovate and provide powerful scores for the times released a statement that gently wiped the fashion for pop futurism aside and told us to beware. We weren't going to beware. It was too much fun dancing like Robbie the Robot or turning the other way and pretending that clunky indy rock kept us safely outside the system. But there is no such place as outside the system. That's why there is no sci-fi to Computer World but plenty of social realism. Its message like its music might have been too dour and genuine for us then, and now too open to ridicule as a kind of missed guess but it's accurate, then and now accurate. While they still had plenty to say this still feels to me like the last stand before they themselves joined in. They already had been the robots with the models in the hall of mirrors and celebrated sparkling days on space age trains. One pause is perhaps all they needed to tell us, one last time, that while me might not be able to change what was to become of us we might learn to live it our own way.
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