More on Computer Love

The song can be read on several levels.  The raw sound was novel in 1981 and was the harbinger of electronic music invading pop and becoming ubiquitous.  The melody, arrangement, and production is supreme atmosphere. It's wistful. It has a retro tint to it. It's future as future-as-past, as something that has worn. I've always read this music as the product of a European modernism that was already the better part of a century old. By the 80s, a lot of internationalist architecture, while still being built around the world, was also starting to crumble.  It was lived-in and becoming gritty. Many of the visual images that Kraftwerk used had this feel to them. So there's a new vibrancy to this music but also a projection of how a future that is still a little ahead of us will be looked back upon.