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Kraftwerk

      2009 [1977]     Trans-Europe Express (2009 Remaster). Produced by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Parlophone UK, streaming.

Review

My first note on the first track of this album was that the song never built into a high tempo, or to the level of intensity, that you would expect a contemporary track to, but not to the track’s detriment. Of the first half of this statement, this is true for every track. Of the latter half, it is not. Perhaps in a Berlin club in 1977, after inhaling some designer drug of the night, I would have a better time dancing to this album than sitting alone critically listening to it. Throughout the album Kraftwerk seem to be building up to somewhere that they never take us on this LP. Even with consideration of this album as (largely) being a precursor to the electronic music I’m more familiar with, sonically there doesn’t seem to be a lot going on, I think the most complicated any track became was no more than five distinct looping layers of music.

Going through the album in order, thematically it’s divided. The first half (Tracks 1-3) are clearly each meant to be stand-alone pieces. Each one having narrative that doesn’t involve the tracks preceding or following. The second half of the album (Tracks 4-8) are thematically and sonically connected.

The narratives of the first half are sparse, to say the least. The most interesting of the three is probably the very first track, “Endless Europe”. In this one Kraftwerk tell us about how endless Europe is, while, over the airy and dream-like electronic loops, tell us of “parks, hotels, and palaces,” “promenades and avenues,” and “elegance and decadence.” This is the track intended to set the tone for the whole album, and immediately we are presented with a work of European Exceptionalism. The musical tone of the track paired with the sparse lyrics tell of us of a Europe that was born long before any of us, and will outlive any of us; one where the fantasy of a clean, yet hedonistic Europe is the truth. This is the Europe I imagine must have existed in the minds of royals like Elagabalus, Marie Antoinette, and Andrew Windsor. Of course, this decadent dream-view of Europe as an eternal place of hedonistic wonder is one that lacks the historical context of the global violence inflicted by various European powers that was required to make that hedonism possible. Hell, it even lacks the historical context of 22 years prior: at the end of the Second World War, Kraftwerk’s home of Dusseldorf had been heavily bombed by the Royal Air Force. There isn’t even something akin to a dark undertone in this track at all: just the dream, and “endless Europe”, repeating through the track as an additional layer to the dreamscape. Perhaps this represents the optimism for a post-war, liberal capitalist Europe—to me, it just represents naivety or *sniff* pure ideology.

The following two tracks on this half are not much to speak of. One (“The Hall of Mirrors”) is not much more than a pop interpretation of the Narcissus myth; the other (“Showroom Dummies”) is a song about how the power of dance can free the soul, but told through the lyrical narrative of store mannequins coming alive. The initial dark tone of the latter track lead me to believe it was intended to be something akin to a horror track, but this too was built into nothing except, “Please dance.”

The second half of the album takes a more conceptual approach, with each track leading into the following track. I have to admit, I do love a good concept album, and I especially love when a well done album almost makes you believe that the song has never truly ended, that the work as a whole should be listened to and considered as a single piece. And I have to hand it to Kraftwerk: in this they succeeded. These five tracks, do indeed, sound like they belong together as a single long piece. I just wish they were more interesting to listen to. As in the first half I had the same issue of wanting either each track to build to something more, or to cut off about two minutes from their run time. The gradual build to nowhere in particular works for one or two tracks, but I don’t think it works for a whole album.

The narrative in this half is at least being told more interestingly than the limited lyrics we’re given in the first half: through the composition of the tracks themselves. The first track (the fourth track of the album, “Trans-Europe Express”) gives us an itinerary of the train’s departure from Paris to Dusseldorf, with a stop in Vienna for a visit in a café, all over a beat that makes you immediately think of a train barreling over tracks. That beat is maintained (in one form or another) until the end of Track 6 (“Abzurg”) where the train comes to a screeching halt, and in Dusseldorf (Track 7, “Franz Schubert”) the dream-Europe of the opening track is back. The final track, “Endless Endless”, lazily fades us out of the album, reminding us that Europe has been, and always will be.

            I would argue that none of these answers matter. Instead, that these place names only serve to help the reality of this story find purchase. The truth of this narrative is that people find ways to love one another, even in hard times. Maybe they find it through religion, washing away their sins in an impromptu river baptism. They find it playing the guitar, selling their soul so that they can play it better than anyone else. They find it running from the law, to win back their lover and reestablish themselves as the pater familias.

            This fact is paired with something the movie most definitely gets right: the heat. In the summer, the heat of Mississippi is oppressive, and there isn’t a scene in this film where almost everyone isn’t sweating. The hear paired with the dreamlike motion through the landscape of the state: the long straight dirt roads that lead on forever across the delta, dust clinging to your skin; the oak groves where you can hide in the shade and rest your eyes even as you sweat through your shirt; driving with the window down just to get a breeze for a second. You lose track of time when all you can think about is how hot you are; you lose track of your place.

            To shift gears, there’s another Coen Brothers film I can always find myself in, this time very different in place and season. Of course, I’m talking about Fargo. Whereas Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? is a film set in a dreamscape of a Mississippi Summer, Fargo is set in a very real Minnesota Winter (in spite of the name, only two scenes takes place in North Dakota).

There are a few things that set Fargo apart in this sense. First, that there is no sense of lost time or place like in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? – there are only four places in the film: Fargo, Minneapolis, Brainerd, and Moose Lake. The time our characters take to travel between them feels realistic, and we’re often shown them driving alone through long stretches of snow covered highway.

Second, the violence has much higher stakes. Although there is a lot of violence present in the latter film, most of it feels low-stakes for our characters. Even when they’re being subjected to it and have to face the consequences of making violent people angry, there’s a sense of security – that our group of well-meaning criminals will find their way out of the current predicament whole. In Fargo, this violence is real. The criminals (in another juxtaposition) are not the kind but unfortunate people we see in Oh Brother, but men who hold a genuine malice for others, and who are shown to kill because it is the most convenient way out of a bad situation or because they’re simply annoyed with another person. These stakes are driven even higher when we realize that our protagonist – Officer Marge Gunderson, police chief from Brainerd who is investigating the triple homicide committed by one of the criminals – is seven months pregnant. This violence comes to a tense conclusion, when Gunderson finally tracks down the kidnappers for hire, to find one of them stuffing the other into a wood chipper. She, the honest and well-meaning police officer, is able to stop the man with two bullets – one of them a wide shot, the other a well-placed and non-lethal shot to the leg.

The final difference I’m going to highlight here is simply how normal our protagonist is. Marge and her husband are simply very normal people. He makes her breakfast when she wakes up, her car needs a jump, they go out to eat at the local buffet and they both get far too much food when making their plates (but that’s what you do at a buffet), she feels uncomfortable in fancy restaurants, and she’s smart as a tack and good at her job. There’s a sense you get when watching Marge Gunderson interact with the world that you’re not watching a character made fantastical for a fantastic world, but rather someone who might have been dropped in from our world, who is simply a good police officer wanting the best for people (which, of course, leads into the argument that she exists in a fantasy in which police are that rather than the enactors of state violence against the general population and especially Non-White people, but that’s both something of a common trope in American fiction and a subject for a different essay).

This normalcy walks hand-in-hand with the cold. Whereas the Summer of Oh Brother shimmers into a heat mirage, making it hard to pin town time and place; the Winter of Fargo makes sure we know where we are – we are in Minnesota, we are on the highway outside of Brainerd, we are standing in the snow inspecting the body of a Minnesota Highway Patrolman. We are in a reality that exists.

Yet, in this actually existing place, we can see ourselves reflected too. We can see ourselves in the love for family; we can see ourselves someone scared for their mother, unsure of what is going to happen to her; we can see ourselves even in the frustrations of the antagonists when he’s complaining about paying a parking fee.