The best concerts are not just heard, they are experienced. On Tuesday night at United Palace (where they will play a second show on Wednesday), electro-pioneers Kraftwerk put that idea into action with an immersive 3D show that covered their 44-year history and yet still managed to look and sound like the future.
The lessons were many and started immediately with opener “The Robots.” These days, Daft Punk are everybody’s favorite Top 40 automatons, but this was a pointed reminder that Kraftwerk came up with the idea of robot pop stars as far back as the 1970s, when the Frenchmen were merely knee-high to a droid.
Sonically too, their far-reaching influence bled through every beat. If EDM has become your new religion lately, then songs such as “Metropolis” and “Man-Machine” should be regarded as key chapters in the genre’s bible. Without their cold, clinical grooves, it’s impossible to imagine how dance music would have existed, let alone taken over the world’s charts.
Singer Ralf Hutter is the only member who has been with the band since it formed in Dusseldorf in 1970. Despite those faraway origins, he is also a key figure in the music history of New York. In 1982, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force sent the burgeoning genre of hip-hop down darker avenues by releasing “Planet Rock,” which sampled Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.” Naturally, the crowd at United Palace enthusiastically greeted the iconic chugging intro of the song as though they were welcoming home a long-lost family member.
But tracing the lineage of pop through Kraftwerk’s songs was nowhere near as fun as the spectacle itself. The 3D glasses handed out on the way in opened up the wonder of the quartet’s projections. Each track had a different mini-film to accompany it; “Tour de France” had cut up images of the world-famous bike race integrated with moving graphics, “Autobahn” was synced up with a simulated drive through the countryside, but most impressive was “Spacelab,” which made you feel like you were in a craft orbiting Earth. As the image of a satellite came hurtling out of the screen, the dazzled audience let out one of the biggest cheers of the night. It was like watching “Gravity,” but without having to endure George Clooney’s insufferable character blathering on and on about nothing.
Watching four German dudes standing still in the near-darkness for two hours doesn’t seem like much fun in theory, but what they created around themselves was completely absorbing. Musically, visually and aesthetically, Kraftwerk have been ahead of the game for years. Even with so many other acts using them as inspirations or even stealing from them outright, they remain untouchable.