The Robots

The robot that Kraftwerk proposed on Die Mensch-Maschine describes what the musician becomes when they use machines as instruments: the human reduced to, or elevated to, a function in a system. “The Robots” states that proposition in its most direct form — four men performing as their own mechanical replacements, and meaning it.

The cultural afterlife of this specific piece — sampled, reinterpreted, cited, built upon — is long enough that it is easy to forget how strange the original proposition was in 1978, when rock music was still largely committed to the idea of human expressiveness as the irreducible point of the enterprise. Kraftwerk had concluded that the machines were the musicians, that the human performer had become indistinguishable from a function in a system. Forty years of citations confirm the verdict.