The Man-Machine Kraftwerk (EMI)
The future looked perilously uncertain in Europe in the late 1970s. The period of post-war prosperity and growth had been ended a few years before by the first major economic crash in decades, while the shadow of nuclear destruction hung heavy, particularly in West Germany, on the front line of the cold war.
At the same time, those same fearsome technological energies were about to unleash what would eventually become the modern, globalised era. The idea of the future was, therefore, both pregnant with opportunity and filled with foreboding.
This equivocal relationship with the technological future characterises most of German electronica pioneers Kraftwerk's output, but never more so than on 1978's The Man-Machine. As ever with Kraftwerk, this is only sparsely spelt out in the album's lyrics. Many of the songs are instrumental or consist of a single repeated word or line, making those lyrics that do occur feel all the more significant, a little tablet-of-stone.
The album's opening track, The Robots, for example, repeats the sinister line 'We are the robots' over and over again in a multi-lingual pun on the Slavic origin of the word 'robot', spelt out in the line 'ja tvoi rabotnik', or 'I am your worker', a comment on the alienating effects of modern working practices in the era of global mass production just being launched.
There's another reference to the potentially anti-human impact of technology in the title and only lyric of Metropolis, with its obvious allusion to Fritz Lang's 1927 dystopian cinematic masterpiece.