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awahlbom at 10:46pm on 19/04/2008 under booklog 2008, books, kraftwerk, music, review, wolfgang flür
awahlbom at 10:46pm on 19/04/2008 under booklog 2008, books, kraftwerk, music, review, wolfgang flür1. Lois McMaster Bujold: Miles Errant
2. Lois McMaster Bujold: Memory
3. Wolfgang Flür: Kraftwerk — I Was A Robot (English edition 2001; German original 1999)
Wolfgang's autobiography. Don't be misled by the title: this is not mainly a book about Kraftwerk, but about how Kraftwerk failed to make use of this uniquely creative and gifted and all-around wonderful individual. (Even if he doesn't say it in so many words, that is the definite impression I get.)
Wolfgang's creativity, it seems, is purely in the realm of music, for he's not a very good writer. The translation and deficient proofreading may have something to do with this (easily checked names are often misspelt, and the German original shines through in places), but that doesn't explain the fact that his grasp of years and numbers is slightly worse than J.K. Rowling's. If it happens once or twice, fair enough; these things happen, and I can make mistakes myself. But when he makes a point of something that is demonstrably impossible, I react. For example, if he was born in 1947, he cannot very well have masturbated at age 16 to The Who's "My Generation" (and who the fuck wanted to know anyway???), a song released in November 1965.
Later, he remembers being very offended by the poster campaign for The Mix. Have his former bandmates no shame, to portray themselves like robots with artificial arms, when there is a civil war going on in Bosnia where children are getting their arms blown off for real? Only the war started several weeks after this campaign and in June 1991, when the single "The Robots" and the album The Mix were released, the war in former Yugoslavia hadn't even started in the first place and wouldn't spread to Bosnia for nearly another year! (Besides, the press photos had been circulating for months by then.)
The book is full of little things like that. He misses complete tours, like the 1976 tour where they used a sequencer on stage for the first time — rather interesting, as he has just discussed the self-same sequencer as the first step towards making him redundant. Later, he mentions that the concert at the Philipshalle in December 1981 was the first time he played in Düsseldorf since he joined; only it wasn't, because he seems to have completely forgotten the first German leg of the same tour only six months before. An unimportant detail, if he hadn't made a big point of it being the FIRST.
For claiming to have left Kraftwerk behind and moved on, Wolfgang talks of very little else, and for someone claiming not to be bitter he is surprisingly fierce, gets upset over the silliest things and doesn't check sources, referring instead to his "pixel-perfect" memory. He contradicts himself in places: first he complains that he always felt like hired help, and then he's very upset when Ralf says in interviews that they were more hired help than full band members. He variously says, to counter Ralf's claim that they have always worked with different people, that Kraftwerk were Ralf, Florian, Karl, and Wolfgang, no more and no less, and that he never saw any other collaborators; then he goes on to say that Kraftwerk was a huge organisation with Peter Bollig, Günter Spachtholz, Achim Dehmann and last but not least Emil Schult as necessary parts of the man-machine. So which one is it?
Something else that seems to have upset him mightily is the CD re-release of The Man-Machine, where his name has allegedly been removed. Only Wolfgang hasn't seen it himself, but someone told him about it over the phone. Unfortunately, he cannot describe it more thoroughly than that. When was it released? Was it the German or the English version? What's the catalogue number? Is his the only name missing? Has anyone except Wolfgang's friend seen it in real life?
Likewise, he makes a big fuss about Conny Plank's name missing from the Autobahn CD. In fact, on the German CD release from 1985 (when he was still in the band), all names apart from the songwriting credits are missing — even Ralf's and Florians! If this was so important to Wolfgang, why did it take him 14 years to check it? In Wolfgang's world, this cannot be a decision by the record company because of space restraint; it must be revisionist history from Ralf and Florian to remove old collaborators they no longer wish to acknowledge.
What seems to be the crux of the matter, the most important focus of his bitterness, is that Ralf and Florian got an American patent for the electronic drumpads already in 1975, something Wolfgang claims was his invention. This is disputed by the others, and is one of the reasons they sued him for the first edition of the book. When you look at the patent, it is for "The ornamental design for an electronic percussion musical instrument, substantially as shown", which doesn't say anything about the internal workings. I don't know the truth, but it appears we only have Ralf's and Florian's word against Wolfgang's on who is the original inventor.
I am not saying that Ralf and Florian, given their actions over the past few years, seem like very sympathetic people, but Wolfgang doesn't really make a good impression here, as a person or as a writer.
2. Lois McMaster Bujold: Memory
3. Wolfgang Flür: Kraftwerk — I Was A Robot (English edition 2001; German original 1999)
Wolfgang's autobiography. Don't be misled by the title: this is not mainly a book about Kraftwerk, but about how Kraftwerk failed to make use of this uniquely creative and gifted and all-around wonderful individual. (Even if he doesn't say it in so many words, that is the definite impression I get.)
Wolfgang's creativity, it seems, is purely in the realm of music, for he's not a very good writer. The translation and deficient proofreading may have something to do with this (easily checked names are often misspelt, and the German original shines through in places), but that doesn't explain the fact that his grasp of years and numbers is slightly worse than J.K. Rowling's. If it happens once or twice, fair enough; these things happen, and I can make mistakes myself. But when he makes a point of something that is demonstrably impossible, I react. For example, if he was born in 1947, he cannot very well have masturbated at age 16 to The Who's "My Generation" (and who the fuck wanted to know anyway???), a song released in November 1965.
Later, he remembers being very offended by the poster campaign for The Mix. Have his former bandmates no shame, to portray themselves like robots with artificial arms, when there is a civil war going on in Bosnia where children are getting their arms blown off for real? Only the war started several weeks after this campaign and in June 1991, when the single "The Robots" and the album The Mix were released, the war in former Yugoslavia hadn't even started in the first place and wouldn't spread to Bosnia for nearly another year! (Besides, the press photos had been circulating for months by then.)
The book is full of little things like that. He misses complete tours, like the 1976 tour where they used a sequencer on stage for the first time — rather interesting, as he has just discussed the self-same sequencer as the first step towards making him redundant. Later, he mentions that the concert at the Philipshalle in December 1981 was the first time he played in Düsseldorf since he joined; only it wasn't, because he seems to have completely forgotten the first German leg of the same tour only six months before. An unimportant detail, if he hadn't made a big point of it being the FIRST.
For claiming to have left Kraftwerk behind and moved on, Wolfgang talks of very little else, and for someone claiming not to be bitter he is surprisingly fierce, gets upset over the silliest things and doesn't check sources, referring instead to his "pixel-perfect" memory. He contradicts himself in places: first he complains that he always felt like hired help, and then he's very upset when Ralf says in interviews that they were more hired help than full band members. He variously says, to counter Ralf's claim that they have always worked with different people, that Kraftwerk were Ralf, Florian, Karl, and Wolfgang, no more and no less, and that he never saw any other collaborators; then he goes on to say that Kraftwerk was a huge organisation with Peter Bollig, Günter Spachtholz, Achim Dehmann and last but not least Emil Schult as necessary parts of the man-machine. So which one is it?
Something else that seems to have upset him mightily is the CD re-release of The Man-Machine, where his name has allegedly been removed. Only Wolfgang hasn't seen it himself, but someone told him about it over the phone. Unfortunately, he cannot describe it more thoroughly than that. When was it released? Was it the German or the English version? What's the catalogue number? Is his the only name missing? Has anyone except Wolfgang's friend seen it in real life?
Likewise, he makes a big fuss about Conny Plank's name missing from the Autobahn CD. In fact, on the German CD release from 1985 (when he was still in the band), all names apart from the songwriting credits are missing — even Ralf's and Florians! If this was so important to Wolfgang, why did it take him 14 years to check it? In Wolfgang's world, this cannot be a decision by the record company because of space restraint; it must be revisionist history from Ralf and Florian to remove old collaborators they no longer wish to acknowledge.
What seems to be the crux of the matter, the most important focus of his bitterness, is that Ralf and Florian got an American patent for the electronic drumpads already in 1975, something Wolfgang claims was his invention. This is disputed by the others, and is one of the reasons they sued him for the first edition of the book. When you look at the patent, it is for "The ornamental design for an electronic percussion musical instrument, substantially as shown", which doesn't say anything about the internal workings. I don't know the truth, but it appears we only have Ralf's and Florian's word against Wolfgang's on who is the original inventor.
I am not saying that Ralf and Florian, given their actions over the past few years, seem like very sympathetic people, but Wolfgang doesn't really make a good impression here, as a person or as a writer.