It is the dawn of the ‘80s and four men in Düsseldorf, in their search for utopia, decide that the machine is ‘the answer’. That if you remove the mess of human feeling from music, what's left is something pure and forward-looking and good. Whether Computer World’s messaging rang true or stands emblematic of the times we live in up for debate, but Kraftwerk were perhaps too optimistic about who gets to stand in the future they were building.
Funkadelic's Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow arrived 11 years earlier from what seems like a different planet entirely. Recorded mostly live in a single session in a Detroit studio, the whole record seems to carry one instruction: get out of your head because your head is a cage someone else built.
Here’s what makes this pairing unbearable in the best possible sense. Kraftwerk probably didn’t think they were building a cage. They probably thought liberation was on the other side of total systematisation. That if you could just get precise enough and post-human enough, you would finally be free of all the mess and blood and compromise that being a human body in history had always meant. But they were white and European, and the history they were trying to escape was not the same history that George Clinton was living inside of and refusing to vacate.
What you hear across these two records is the 20th century's central argument about what freedom actually is.
One answer says: transcend the body, become information, and escape the mess of being human.
The other says: the mess is the freedom. The body is the intelligence. The ass leads and the mind follows or… you are not free, you are just more efficiently imprisoned.
Come ready to feel the contradiction.
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