The reason I don’t like Kraftwerk is that they deliberately try so hard to make their music inhuman. There’s no humanity to be found in an indistinguishable vocalist blankly repeating “The Robots” into a microphone, tone or pitch never changing while plastic synthesizer beats repeat seemingly endlessly in a repetitive rhythm that doesn’t dare to think outside of its programming. Their songwriting is so cold and calculated that is impossible for me to empathize with any emotions that they’re trying to portray.

At best, this reminds me of a low budget ’70s sci-fi flick, and if I really wanted to be reminded of how cold, bleak, and poorly made those were (not that I’d want to, I generally dislike western sci-fi), I’d put on an album by Klaus Schulze. If an artist can’t be taken anywhere by their music (as shown by the inorganic stoic songwriting and performance), then neither can I. If an artist can’t display passion in their music, I’m not going to feel it either.

This act they put on strikes me as a gimmick (honestly I don’t think a gimmick is necessarily bad) throwback to the now-retro space age, but in retrospect it made Kraftwerk’s music a product of its time and removed the universal value of it. Since Kraftwerk’s time, electronic musicians have gotten a greater palette of ways to express their emotions and can actually succeed in touching my heart. I respect the pioneers for helping to create an interest in and audience for electronic music, but I can’t enjoy a band like Kraftwerk in the context of everything I’ve heard since. I can always appreciate them, but history’s for the books and my ears are for music that I enjoy and feel.

Addendum: It also doesn’t help that my brain keeps reading their name as “Kraf-twerk.” Would probably be some girl coldly bouncing her booty to a perfect steady rhythm without any natural sense of her own rhythm. And I don’t want none of that.