62. Kraftwerk, "Showroom Dummies" (1977)

(listen)

Honestly, all you need to get the gist of what's going on here is the title and album cover (above)—these German pioneers of synthesizer pop and travelers in avant-garde nether regions come with a kind of sly sense of humor that's hard to know how to prepare for. Of course, by this point in their career, Kraftwerk principals Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider had all but given up interest in the clinical soundscapes, pointing themselves instead more or less directly into the heart of the pop sun, such as they understood it. The trappings are only the beginning of the charms of "Showroom Dummies." As this nifty little rattletrap unfolds across the six minutes that it goes, its features include the hushed and somber monotone of the vocals, sound effects of glass shattering, all manner of gentle stops and pivots, and the kind of lurching propulsion that stays with you a long while. "We go into a club / Then we start to dance / We are showroom dummies ... showroom dummies ... showroom dummies." There is arguably a debt here to filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or anyway a coinciding fascination with the surface textures of Weimar Germany, the tawdry, glinting, cruel world of fashion world glamour, which glows in the eyes of those greedy to escape. On the other hand, I understand the song may have been written in mocking response to a concert review that in turn made fun of the way they looked. And evidently the muttered preamble—"eins-zwei-drei-vier"—is there for the homage to contemporaries the Ramones. So that about settles it. The more you look into this the more there is packed into it.