Florian Schneider obit

Colby Cosh: Remembering Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider, the prophet of the post-human

The death of Florian Schneider, the most important figure in German rock-era popular music, was announced to the world this week 

He was not on the list.

The death of Florian Schneider, the most important figure in German rock-era popular music, was announced to the world this week. Schneider had died of cancer on April 21, two weeks after turning 73. I never immersed myself in the music of Schneider’s group, Kraftwerk; my taste runs more toward Can, Kraftwerk’s major rivals in the history of krautrock. In Isaiah Berlin’s famous schema, Can is the foxy group that steals from every culture and is constantly welding together improbable effects, marrying Karlheinz Stockhausen to funk with various drifters at the microphone. Kraftwerk is the hedgehog that knew one move, had one schtick and kept on driving it home until they were universally recognized as geniuses.

Comic geniuses, to be sure, although it is always hard to know exactly how much a German cosplaying an ostentatious, austere philosophy is exploiting Germanness for comic effect. That’s part of what makes German things ha-ha-ha-so-German to us: their sense of irony comes from such a different mental map, with such a different set of dimensions and thresholds that you are never safely confident about how much of it is a put-on. Devo was the American Kraftwerk — a pop group pursuing a fundamental faux-futuristic conceit to the edge of credibility — but those guys were from Akron, Ohio. They weren’t quite as hard to scan.

Kraftwerk was a put-on, but a staggeringly influential, world-changing one that worked pretty well when accepted at face value. Once you accepted that the song about being robots was not really going to have any “lyrics” other than, “We are the robots,” you could agree with the logic (most lyrics are stupid anyway!) and find yourself wondering whether art really needs to have an identifiably human physical source — whether music really needs to be an oil painting, bearing the touch of the handmade, or whether it can just be a factory-made Warhol.

We are now, let’s say as a half-informed guess, three to five years away from having pop chart hits written by machine-learning algorithms. The questions that Florian Schneider put to us in the 1970s are metastasizing awfully fast.

One of the funniest things about Kraftwerk is that Schneider started out playing the flute. One can’t imagine getting further away from the spirit of Kraftwerk’s classic records than that. (It is possible to imagine Kraftwerk and Jethro Tull on a double bill, but only during Tull’s electronic-influenced 1980-84 phase, when they came down with a bad case of the zeitgeist.) Even compared other wind instruments, the flute is sensitive to the energy and habitus of its human player: it is concentrated pneuma, pure organic life.

Just by chance, this barbarous noise tube was the interface between mind and pure music that Schneider happened to be able to use first. He began adding so many electronic effects to his flute sound that it became more convenient to abandon the hominid security blanket of the mere instrument in favour of the piano-style keyboard and synthesizer.

This is only what every other rock musician in the world was trying or considering at the same time — accepting the equal-temperament keyboard as the most logical common interface, the musician’s QWERTY — but Schneider and Kraftwerk found the next level of purity. They ascended beyond any human activation of musical notes, making truly synthetic music with almost no human-to-speaker physical interface detectable.

The sales pitch was that this was the music of a less personal future that young record buyers were sure to find themselves growing old in and, well, here we are. Locked in our protective hygienic cells, we communicate in 280-word ASCII sequences and have Zoom conversations with computer-generated backgrounds. Our human interactions right now are all as overdesigned as any Kraftwerk record.

And if I felt the breath of another human being in any setting right now, I would panic a little. Normally I don’t write with music playing, but I see I have let all of Kraftwerk’s “Die Mensch-Maschine” bleep and tick and hum in the background while trying to commemorate Florian Schneider. There was nothing in it to disrupt my attention, to disturb me with the indicia of another human body’s physical signature.