In this week’s New Yorker, pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones breaks down why Kraftwerk was indeed worthy of a MoMA retrospective, and why he thought the retrospective was pretty good.
There are some fun biographical tidbits here, among them:
Hütter and Schneider began collaborating in the late sixties, in Düsseldorf, and in 1970 opened a studio, a loft that they called Kling Klang, near the railway station. Düsseldorf was a center for avant-garde art; Kling Klang shared a wall with Gerhard Richter’s studio, and, for breaks, they would all play foosball with Joseph Beuys. First calling themselves the Organization, they later chose Kraftwerk (“power station”), because of its implications—“energy,” “art work,” “craft”—and also because of the ubiquity on German highways of signs for power stations.
Read the whole thing here.