Señor Coconut
El Baile Aleman

THE REVIEW

Kraftwerk fans, let's arm ourselves with a large dose of self-irony and listen to the work, the de-creation of this genius of the global music scene: Uwe Schmidt alias Señor Coconut alias Atom Heart alias Lassigue Bendthaus.
The album begins with a very amusing "Introduction" where a German tries to speak English, pretending to be Spanish. But two are the gems of the album: "Trans-Europe Express," where the main riff (which in the namesake album was performed by a synth) is played by marimbas, "Autobahn" where the voice filtered by the vocoder is replaced by a choir of Creoles, "Tour de France" which becomes a captivating Latin merengue.

Bewildering, entertaining, very funny, curious, hot, "El Baile Alemán" is a deconstruction of the serial music of Kraftwerk, ironic and bizarre, and should never be taken seriously, otherwise it would only lead to grim and inappropriate critiques for an album that should be celebrated as it is a novelty, an engaging divertissement. It is all performed in a synthetic Cuban salsa, plastic, pop (just like the album cover) where the beauty lies precisely in the lack of a boundary between the serious and the playful, in the importance of parody (if indeed there is any).

The year it was released, "El Baile Alemán," in the United States, sold a lot, reaching the top of the album sales charts and, remarkably, Señor Coconut became more famous than Kraftwerk themselves, who were very pleased with these renditions. Certainly, Señor Coconut was very bold and courageous in remaking classics, milestones, of world electronic music.
It's as if Nick Cave started singing Antonio Carlos Jobim's songs… truly improper!
Yet, Mr. Schmidt fully achieved this challenging goal, obtaining a moderate, appreciable result, confirming the talent of this whimsical German DJ. A peculiarity: did you listen carefully at the beginning of "Autobahn"? There's a car that won't start… could it be a Fiat?