How Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ altered the course of electronic music

The veteran New York DJ and producer Justin Strauss has led a life in electronic music, but in the mid-1970s, he was a rising rockstar in the power-pop combo Milk ‘N’ Cookies. In 1974, when the young band travelled to London to record their self-titled LP for Island Records, ‘Autobahn’ — both single and album — were moving up the worldwide charts. 

“I turned on the TV to this Top Of The Pops kind of show, and there was a promo clip of ‘Autobahn’,” he recalls. “We were into glam and Bowie and T. Rex then, and I had never heard of Kraftwerk. My father had these albums from Perrey and Kingsley — these weird little synthesiser records — and obviously the Beatles had been experimenting with electronics, but I had never really heard anything like ‘Autobahn’. I was blown away by it — by the emotion and humanity they brought to those machines. It opened my mind to the possibilities of electronic music at a time when I definitely wasn’t thinking about that at all.”

Arthur Baker, the legendary record producer who’s worked with everyone from Tina Turner and Diana Ross to New Order and Freeez, concurs, though the track’s impact was perhaps less obvious to him at first. He recalls working at the Boston record shop Soundscope when ‘Autobahn’ hit the shelves. “Back then, I was into everything,” he remembers. “The Temptations, Sly and the Family Stone, the Allman Brothers, Bowie, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, just everything… It was the beginning of disco, too, with Blue Magic, MFSB and all that Philly stuff.”

None of which have much in common with ‘Autobahn’, but once the album arrived in the shop, he played it over and over again. “At the time, I didn’t think of it as like, ‘Oh, this is going to create a new sound’,” Baker says. “But we played it so much in the store, I think it probably did have some effect on me.”

Though Baker had familiarity with the concept of electronic music at this point  — he had taken a class with the composer and educator Everett Hafner at Hampshire College — he initially felt ‘Autobahn’ was a bit gimmicky, owing in part to the similarity between its “fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n” vocal and the Beach Boys hit ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’. (Hütter has repeatedly denied any explicit Beach Boys’ connection to the song, their similarity shrugged off as pure coincidence.)

Nonetheless, by the turn of the next decade, Baker was fully sold. In 1981, he collaborated with the noted New York-based Kraftwerk fan Afrika Bambaataa to create Soulsonic Force’s ‘Planet Rock’, a single that interpolated elements of their tracks ‘Trans-Europe Express‘ and ‘Numbers’ to become a seminal work of North American electro.