Uno, Dos, Tres, Cuatro

Electronic legend Florian Schneider recent announced his departure from Kraftwerk. When I saw the band play in San Francisco a few years ago it was almost a religious passage for the fans of techno, hip hop, synthpop and all things electronic who witnessed the show. Fortunately it was captured on film:

Monolithic Super Bands

PopMatters recently made their predictions about the generational shifting of musical canon and today's SF Chronicle compiled a causal list of twenty "new classic" albums that classic rock fans may have missed:

While music scribes and the Bay Area faithful continue to preach the golden-era gospel of monolithic super bands from the '60s, the alternative music congregation believes Kraftwerk, Talking Heads and Joy Division to be more influential than the Beatles, the Stones and the Dead. These alt-rockers know their music has been underappreciated, while all of the references to the Stones printed in The Chronicle over the past 40 years probably exceed the number of times the word "God" is used in the Bible...

All You Do Is Talk Talk

Thanks to Live 105's "Coldplay Weekend" I had a chance to hear the much-debated-on-electronic-music-forums "Talk" several times. Essentially there was an odd amount of fuss a few months ago over the adopting the synth melody from Kraftwerk's "Computer World" into a repeated guitar solo in the Coldplay song. The amount of debate the song received surprised me considering the amount of sampling pioneered by Kraftwerk themselves (although usually in a modernist context as opposed to the post-modern referencing point that sampling is often used as today) and in the electronic scene in general. Regardless of whatever pointless controversy surrounds the song it is heartening to see how well the “Computer World” melody translates into an arena rock guitar line. If nothing else it speaks to the timelessness of Kraftwerk, and their continuing influence on so much of today’s music.

I found this at cute story at Contact Music regarding how Coldplay obtained permission to use the riff:

But he was only able to obtain the riff by writing to frontman RALF HUTTER and begging him to let Coldplay use it.

He admits, "The only thing I could think of was the pen pal letters I learnt in German lessons at school. I had no idea if they knew who Coldplay were so had to explain myself like a 15 year-old school-boy.

"Dear Ralf, I sing in a band called Coldplay, blah, blah. I drew a little picture. Everyone says it's extraordinary that they said yes.'

Compare clips: Kraftwerk, Coldplay