"Their Old Is Still Our New"

"In addition, the name and its industrial aesthetic seemed like a subtle affront to the earthy English hippies who were popular at the time, bands such as Cream, the Yardbirds, and Led Zeppelin, who performed versions of American blues, complete with long guitar solos. The guitarist Michael Rother, who played in an early version of Kraftwerk and later formed the influential rock band Neu! with the drummer Klaus Dinger, told me that Hütter was the first musician he had met who 'had the same feeling about melody and harmony that I’d held inside me that was not based on blues or the structure of American-British pop music.' Living in postwar Germany, and alert to the problems of the immediate past and the proximate present, musicians were trying to establish a German pop language from thin air. Mimicking Anglo-American musical poses was cheesy, but anything that sounded overtly Germanic evoked dangerous historical memories. What the groups of Kraftwerk’s cohort settled on, in common, was reduction and repetition: no guitar solos."

Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker discusses the Kraftwerk retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.