I love it when birthday presents keep coming. Mine is the last day of January. I got a “Happy Birthday, Clau.” message from my friend Joe, who is now a TV editor but we met when I first started my deejaying adventure. Joe was the first person to give me a deejay residency at a weekly party. Later, he called me to tell me that he had four tickets to the Kraftwerk 3D show, and that one of those highly sought after tickets had my name on it as a birthday present! I freaked the funk out! Apparently, Kraftwerk was going to be performing at the Walt Disney Concert Hall for a total of eight days, each day they would play one of their records all the way through in 3D. The acquisition process of a ticket was an intricate one. One had to enter a lottery to win a chance to buy a ticket, and you couldn’t choose the date of the performance. We lucked out! The album we were going to see was “Trans-Europe Express”, by far the best record they’ve put out, in my opinion!
Kraftwerk is the most influential group in the history of electronic music. Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, who also made music in Germany at the time, influenced Daft Punk, Coldplay, Fergie, Madonna, Afrika Bambaataa, Jay-Z and many others. The same year “Trans-Europe Express” came out, Giorgio and Donna Summer released “I Feel Love”, making 1977 the golden year of electronic music. I speculate, that given the “Post WWII” era, a lot of their music was secretly political. In 1975, Kraftwerk released an album called “Radio-Activity” which was sampled by New Order on the song “Blue Monday”. Four years later, Giorgio had a single called “E=MC2” and Blondie put out the single “Atomic” and even though they blew my mind, Kraftwerk blew me away.
Music List:
(everything) KRAFTWERK
Tour de France
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