h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This entry is quite outdated and has some details wrong, so here's my attempt to complement it, and explain further why Kraftwerk has left such a mark in music history:

Tone Float was not the name of Ralf and Florian's first band. It's the title of the only LP they made, in 1968. The famous producer Conny Plank helped producing it. The band was called Organisation.

Florian's last name is Schneider, not Scheider. :P

Kraftwerk today distances themselves from the first three studio albums ("Kraftwerk", "Kraftwerk 2" and "Ralf & Florian"). They are very much experimental and different from their later works. They have never been re-released on CD other than as bootlegs. However, they do have some relevance in music history because David Bowie (a big Kraftwerk fan to this day) was influenced by these albums in his Ziggy Stardust era, (there is even a song, "V2-Schneider", where he pays homage to the band) and "Kraftwerk 2" was also the first album ever to use a drum machine.

The fourth album, "Autobahn", was their breakthrough album, through an international hit single version of the title track. It was a great influence on Chicago and Detroid DJ:s and made Kraftwerk an important component in the invention of both House and Techno music.

The fifth album, "Radioactivity", was the first to see the "classic" Kraftwerk lineup, featuring percussionists Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür. Both would leave the band many years later and end their friendship with Ralf and Florian. "Radioactivity" was the first Kraftwerk album to go 100% electronic, and they've never left that path since.

The sixth album, "Trans-Europe Express", was recorded with both German and English lyrics. It is not true, as previously stated, that purists will only listen to German version Kraftwerk songs. Kraftwerk frequently uses multi-language lyrics, featuring also words in French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese etc. A devoted fan would be likely to buy and listen to both German and international versions of the albums. Trans-Europe Express had an unexpected, but very important, influence on popular music. It was frequently sampled by black American DJ's, most notably Afrika Bambaataa, who basically ripped off the melody of the title track "Trans-Europe Express", added some beats from "Numbers", a later Kraftwerk track, and added his own rap lyrics on top. The result was "Planet Rock", arguably the song that laid the foundation of Hip-Hop music! Curiously enough, Kraftwerk thus made a contribution to yet another important genre in modern music.

With the next album, "The Man-Machine", Kraftwerk completed their image by playing along with the media's mocking of their appearance as robotic, by bringing forth robotic-looking dolls to "replace" themselves. They even called for a press conference at one point and the journalists arrived to find only four dummies around a table with papers of pre-asked and pre-answered questions! The album features the classic track "The Robots" as well as "The Model", which is their most famous and pop-sounding song ever. It became a hit single and the title itself says it all in terms of what this song meant to the 80's synthpop wave, featuring bands like Depeche Mode, Human League, New Order and many more.

Kraftwerk kept steaming ahead of everyone else and released the even more refined album "Computer World" in 1981, which marked the peak in their production. It was followed by a big world tour.

The next intended album, "Techno Pop", would never see the light of day. It was preceded by the very influential single "Tour De France" in 1983, a homage to their new obsession: Cycling. But Ralf was unhappy with the mixing of the album and then a cycling accident had him out for almost a year. Samplers were the new big thing in electronic music at this time and Kraftwerk's analogue sounds seemed no longer to keep ahead of the game like they used to. Finally, the album re-appeared in a very different form as "Electric Café", without the track "Tour De France" and using a lot of sampling. It was not a success in sales and neither with the critics. Kraftwerk closed the doors to its now legendary Kling Klang studio and wouldn't reappear until five years later with the album "The Mix", featuring remade versions of some of their greatest hits, with a much more dance beat feeling to them. The album was followed by another world tour, but without Karl and Wolfgang, who left because they were given no creative freedom and were bored with the slow production tempo. They were replaced by Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz, who are still around today but are very rarely acknowledged as having any creative input on the music, which is probably not a fair picture.

Kraftwerk went almost completely silent during the later half of the 90's, but returned in 1999 with a single called "Expo 2000", which was based on a vocoded jingle for the Hannover World Expo that they made.

In 2003 came their first album in 17 years: "Tour De France Soundtracks", which finally realizes the full concept of their 1983 single and celebrated the 100th anniversary of the famous cycling event. With a legacy having just grown during their silent years it would be impossible to live up to expectations of this new album, and the album got mixed reviews. However, it was followed up by their most extensive world tour ever in 2004, which met with great success. With a tour DVD and remastered versions of all their albums since Autobahn in the pipeline, Kraftwerk is confirming their place in music history.