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It has probably happened to everyone to wake up at five in the morning for an important work appointment, to have a nice grooming session in the bathroom at home and -oh dear- carelessly let slip from your hand the precious Rexona soap intended for your face; well, curses and various exclamations, then collecting what, once it falls on the ground, is now a distant relative of the soap you were handling: various hairs and fuzz (but where on earth do they come from?), dust, tiny insects... darn it, we always postpone spring cleaning to summer, and it's mid-May. And now? Rinse and rinse again, the hairs never come off, and woe to whoever stuffed these damned cosmetics with fats: water doesn't affect them, if anything, it worsens the situation. And so, here is the salient problem: how to meta-clean. In short, how do I wash what is meant to wash, how do I repair what is generally meant to repair. A few nights ago, the little tape reel broke: I tore off a piece of adhesive tape as best as I could and tried to mend the newly broken plastic pieces... nothing doing. I didn't know how to meta-repair. The object to resolve the object, that's the key to everything: how on earth do you do it?
How to solve this substantial problem? How to discuss the very object of the discussion? A question that's difficult to resolve.
The Kraftwerk solved the dilemma. The Kraftwerk? Yes, them indeed. With "Computer World" of 1981, the German band offers the resolution of the labyrinth, with an unparalleled content and formal innovation: circumvent the object through the object itself, talk about electronics through electronics, meta-electronics. A stroke of genius. Through the most striking electronic sensations, Hütter and companions speak of the now widespread technological revolution of the early '80s: "Crime, Travel, Communication, Entertainment, Computer World" recites the album's title track, with the explicit will to list as commonplaces the multifaceted dimensions of the new computerized era. It is music imbued with itself, self-referential; precisely through the new technological innovations, Kraftwerk express their personal point of view on the innovations themselves: meta-music, meta-technology, but also meta-Kraftwerk, because Kraftwerk talk about Kraftwerk, and their music inevitably addresses itself. "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator": a declaration of poetics through which the subject is sucked in by the object: the focus is on the complement, and the predicate is nothing more than the complement itself, with due respect to a subject, the individual, now confined to the role of a simple manual executor of mathematical calculation. The self inexorably disappears, devoid of connotations, with no more feelings or intentions: in the whirlwind world of numbers, in a cauldron saturated with symbols and graphemes to which even Democritus himself, theorist of the "quantitative" nature of creation, would not be able to attribute any kind of immune defense, here every sentimental ambition capable of still involving the being fades: "Another lonely night / Stare at the TV screen / I don't know what to do / I need a rendez-vous" recites the sardonic "Computer Love," among the most significant tracks of the work: the computer sucks feeling into the vortex of exhaustion and makes it a satisfied nourishment: the intimate human essence dies. It dies.
Where does it die? In the music. What does the music talk about? Technology. What is technology used for? For music. What music? Computer World.
Never mind the soap.
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