Karrot
Foreword - Summer 2018
During the long, hot Summer last year I went to two fancy dress parties.
For the first, I dressed up as a member of Kraftwerk from the sleeve of their 1978 album ‘The Man Machine’. I wore a black tie, ruby red lipstick but an orange shirt.
No red in the wardrobe. A fatal flaw that nobody at the party seemed to notice.
I wore the shirt again at the second fancy dress party where everyone had to dress as a vegetable. The orange colour was much more appropriate this time.
I went as a carrot.
Bright orange shirt, spike collared, embellished with a stalk stick sprouting out of the chest pocket.
I felt I did a major disservice to the experimental rock group, but, then again, a great service to the taproot.
Machine versus Nature.
Musique Concrète contre Carotte.
Roboter gegen Gemüse.
Nature had won.
Reason defeated by Romanticism.
This time.
Hong Kong: A Futurist City
April 1841: ‘A barren rock with hardly a house upon it.’ Hong Kong as described in correspondence between the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Henry John Temple Palmerston and Captain Charles Eliot, a senior superintendent of trade in Guangdong.
That sterile, naked rock in the South China Sea is now a vision of the future.
Le Péril Jaune — the Yellow Peril was a form of xenophobic ‘Orientalism’ that emerged in fin de siècle Europe. The fear that eventually the ‘East’ would bite back after centuries of exploitative colonialism. It re-emerged in a new form in the latter part of the nineteenth century. An example is seen in Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’ (1982). It was like an asiatic form of the Red Scare. The future portrayed as a menace — the dread of sky rises with neon lights beaming out through a haze of dim pollution and hard rain, the inhabitants like rats in a cage, isolated. Blade Runner even has east-asian characters on the neon lights above Deckard & co.
A robotic age where humans were threatened by a digital data armageddon.
Ridley Scott’s vision of what 2019 would look like was a bit off. But the black rain and sky scrapers and neon lights certainly exist today in Hong Kong. Lack of space means the city is built upwards. Land is the most valuable commodity. Reclaimed and reclaimed from the sea. Skyward out of the green peaks. Squeezed in. A policy of Futurism adopted: old buildings continually replaced to construct the new.
Higher.
Higher.
Higher.
Bamboo scaffolding, sturdy, used to build all of this metropolis.
As an example:
First Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Company building: Wardley House, HQ from 1865 until 1882. Torn down.
Second: Victorian style with a verandah completed in 1886. Ripped down in 1934.
Third: A cream Art-Deco structure erected in its place, finished in 1935. Razed for a new building in 1978.
Fourth: The current structure was completed in 1985 — at the time the most expensive building in the world. Designed by Norman Foster.
Night: a beacon of neon.
Day: All steel and strength.
Natural light pours in, cascading light beams race down.
Visible: a skeletal structure à la Renzo Piano’s Pompidou in Paris, showing its entrails. Beauty in the function: a machine aesthetic. The modernist Bauhausians saw art as inseparable from everyday function. Foster was clearly influenced by this.
On the way out to see Kraftwerk in Kowloon, I looked back at this ‘barren’ rock in the South China Sea. Lights refracted, bounced and sidled out on to the dark waters of Victoria Harbour where limpets stick tight to the hull of the Star Ferry, sucking it all in. As I was. Attempting to suck it all in, to absorb the future that Kraftwerk, as prophets, attempted to predict, or even warn us about.
‘Future Shock’ — 1972
In the late 60s and 70s, technology advanced and came with it a fear of its potential power. The 1972 documentary, Future Shock, based on the book by Alvin Toffler, opens with host Orson Welles walking in an airport tunnel on a ‘modern’ travellator, proclaiming:
…Our modern technologies have changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live in an age of anxiety and time of stress. And with all our sophistication, we are in fact the victims of our own technological strengths — we are the victims of shock. A future shock.
Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’ observes what happens when people are overwhelmed by change:
…the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.
Orson Welles was blown away by the acceleration of change and particularly amazed by the travellator carrying his bulk.
The 1968 generation in West Germany, the first generation growing up as adults born after the end of the war, examined and questioned the recent past and wanted to build a new Germany from zero hour. German culture was broken. The aim was to construct a fresh one, from the ground up, fastened to a deep denial of the traditions imposed upon them. Liberated from the past. In post-war Germany, Marshall Plan money and Soviet investment made the plumes of smoke coming from factory chimneys thicker, darker and more prolific.
Technology became a symbol of the new German youth.
Kraftwerk’s sound came from their onomatopoeic Kling Klang Studios in Dusseldorf. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider met in the late 60s at an experimental music course. Bred from the Krautrock movement: the noise of tomorrow’s world. Schneider and Hütter started Kraftwerk. As time went on, they stopped using instruments and used drum machines and synthesisers. Invention of a new sound. Music of the everyday, the noise of the factory, the machine or the noises of a motorway. Kraftwerk dressed like bankers or conservative engineers, antithesis to the long flowing hair or sweaty leotards or the skin tight painted on pants of Robert Plant that was popular at the time.
The four current members are Ralf Hütter, Fritz Hilpert, Henning Schmitz and Falk Grieffenhagen. Schneider left in 2008. There have been twenty members in total over the last half-century. Appropriately, the band has adopted a hop-on-hop-off the travellator approach. A carousel for the future. Constantly churning the cogs.
Star Hall — Monday, April 29th 2019
Each member of the audience were given 3-D glasses. I was there, the same venue — Star Hall Kowloon Bay — a month ago for a Boyzone concert. This was different.
I drank the Boyz back like a cool can of soda pop.
Whereas now I was ready to suckle on steel tubing and guzzle and gulp a litre of kerosene.
Sugary bubblegum replaced with avant-garde electro.
Four Boyz gone — in their place:
Four techno horseman of the digital apocalypse.
Disc jockeys astride their podiums.
They opened with ‘Numbers’. Countdown throughout:
Eins, zwei, drei, vier
Fünf, sechs, sieben, acht,
Uno, dos
Três, quatro
One, Two,
Ichi, ni, san, shi
Adjin, dva, tri
Li, tva, tri
A robotic voice, distorted. Ticking-clock-beat towards doom. Fast-paced. Exponential acceleration. Clanking future: a symphony of the factory.
In the 1970s, a hysteria of the memory of the Gestapo and Stasi neighbours policing across the curtain put fear in the mind’s of the people. Collection of data became a factor in all this. This was due to the Baader-Meinhof-Bande, a far-left militant group founded in 1970. Technology was used to track them and stamp the gang out. Florian Schneider’s house was searched by authorities at the time. Alerted by a neighbour that many men were entering his apartment — The Lives of Others — Das Leben der Anderen.
“Ello this is Dusseldorf Police Station”
“Ello there, there is a load of young fellas going into an apartment next door and they are making kling klangs and bleep bloops on the other side of the wall”
“Danke, Citizen. We are on our way”
A genuine fear of being observed and listened to influenced the album ‘Computer World’ and the track of the same name. They played this next.
Interpol, Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard.
Repeated over a wandering, eerie synth.
Next: ‘Computer Love’. The paradox of modern urban life: alienation co-existing with the pleasures of modern technology. A fear of the computer but also a love for it. A feeling of tenderness describing a date with data. Prophetic. Gadgets invading human life.
‘The Man-Machine’ followed. The Man Machine — a new Human. The computer is part of them. Technology forming new limbs in the modern anatomy.
Man Machine
Pseudo-human being
Man Machine
Superhuman being
Their big hit: ‘The Model’ brought cheers from the humans in the crowd.
She’s a model and she’s looking good,
I’d like to take her home that’s understood.
Hütter showing the unnerving polished politeness of his sub-conscious admiration.
‘Neon Lights’, Hütter sings over a chirpy melody, his voice wispy and hopeful as he eyes the rising and blinking lights of the modern metropolis before him. He could be describing Hong Kong — a city of neon. I saw a dusty old clip of a glassblower shaping the narrow tubes, bending under intense heat, slender openings vacuumed and burned and pumped neon pink glow or helium yellow or argon blue. The symbol of a busy and isolated city of the modern world. My dad has ‘Neon Lights’ on a 12 inch vinyl. It was itself neon green and would glow as it turned on the turntable. Then again it only glowed if you turned off the lights. Every modernity has its own modernity.
The 3-D screens then showed a Volkswagen Beetle, jangling keys in the ignition, chugging along the Autobahn, the hills either side explode into green as the snaking lanes expand into the distance. An orchestral trance inducing rendition of the noises of the motorway: overtaking, beep, honk, ignition, undertaking. Playful chanting:
Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn
Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn
‘Trans-Euro Express’, a train crashing out of the 3-D screen into our eyes. This song was sampled and manipulated by James Murphy for LCD Soundsystem’s Get Innocuous. As the 3-D train floated out of the screen I was reminded of the 1895 black and white short film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière. Brothers, not Lumière et Son.
It is said that when first shown, the audience were in a such a panic that they screamed and ran from the theatre. They couldn’t believe their eyes saw a train coming towards them ready to crash and crush. Now this modern train, TEE embossed on the side flew out like a bullet train into the zombified audience, but we remained motionless — immunised to the technology.
The beats of the musique concrète, their travellating intensity influencing Hip Hop, Dr Dre calling ‘Metal on Metal’ a huge impact on his career. David Bowie’s song V-2 Schneider is dedicated to Ralf Schneider and the similarity it evident — the tribute comparing Schneider to the German rocket of aggression, but in later decades after the war it was that technology that propelled rockets of exploration into space.
As Bowie said:
The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.
Arriving and departing: the train, the factory conveyor belt or the travellator. In 1983, New Order sampled Kraftwerk for their breakthrough dance rock hit ‘Blue Monday’. Even fresh contemporary work like Tyler the Creator’s ‘Foreword’ off ‘Flower Boy’: the clockwork beat is all reminiscent, he cited Krautrockers Can as an influence, particularly their haunted bass lines.
Brutalism: gaudy trainers becoming fashionable, Virgil Abloh leaving the labels on, printing product information on the outside. Show us your work. Mechanical, a glimpse inside the factory. Turn it inside out. Kraftwerk has influenced so much of what we absorb today.
A true moment of technological history came at the end of Autobahn:
As the noises of the motorway faded, the four stoic figures stood moving their hands but stiff and robotic.
Oh.
What?
One of them started looking around and shrugging and breaking from the rehearsed stoicism. Gesticulating to the other three.
The 3-D projector had stopped working!
There was an awkward energy all of sudden.
Ralf Hütter interrupted the unnerving silence in a wispy Germanic manner.
“The projector has broken”
Silence.
A synchronised shrug from all four.
“Rental equipment”
Silence.
A synchronised robotic shake of the heads.
Abject silence.
Monotone:
“Let there be light”
Elbows raised, primed.
A synchronised flick off a few knobs.
The alarming noise of a Geiger counter starts.
Layered over a Radioactive warning sign, an error message sprung on to the screen:
Projector switched off due to abnormal voltage.
The future is here. Kraftwerk predicted it. Betrayed by the machines they love. Albeit rental. Or was this their joke on us? But these perfect machines still have humanity: human error, somewhere deep down.
Is there hope for the human race?
As the song ‘Pocket Calculator’ simply bloops:
I am adding and subtracting
Building falls, a new one rises. Something is added while another is subtracted. Never-ending progress built upon the foundations of the former. LP became cassette, cassette became CD, CD became Digital. All things are improved upon and made more accessible, all former things are left as relics in the dust.
Where is the endpoint of technological progress?
Is there one?
As dying Replicant, Roy Batty says on a rain-splashed roof:
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Time to die, indeed. But in death, there is rebirth. Here in ‘Blade Runner’, the Futurist fantasy comes to life — a robot acknowledging the ephemeral nature of life.
Human error is alive and well in the world of Robots. As the concert comes to a close four robot mannequins are brought on stage as the humans bow off stage left.
The robots gesticulate their stiff limbs awkwardly to ‘The Robots’, as a chant in Russian comes out of the speakers:
Ja tvoi sluga,
ja tvoi Rabotnik
(I am your servant
I am your worker)
The humans replaced by robots.
Who is the servant?
Who is the worker?
Is this what the future holds? And who is in charge?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who will guard the guards themselves?