In search of computer love.
“In 1959, Texas Instruments’ Jack Kilby files the first patent for an integrated circuit. (Texas racists later run him out of town, crying “segregation forever!”)”
Today, 2008 September 2, is the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit, and invention that lead to electronic music, Japanese music machines, personal computers, the internet, bitpop and YouTube, to name but a disparate yet connected few.
Much of what we now call the origins of postmodernity coincides with the “microchip revolution or digital revolution,” aptly described by techno-utopian writer Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) .
With “Computer Love” (1981), Kraftwerk became the first German musical ensemble to hit No. 1 on the U.K. music charts and the first band to reach an audience with a love song to the computer.
Zapp and Roger also professed their love for man’s best friend in “Computer Love”[3] (1985).
Computer love can lead to computer addiction. By the mid eighties most traditional orchestration was replaced by “Japanese music machines” in Western music. Marvin Gaye’s single “Sexual Healing” lead the way.
An outright celebration of the electronic aesthetic came with electronic disco (“I Feel Love,” “Do You Wanna Funk”), electro funk (“Planet Rock”), techno (“Techno City”) and house music(“Your Love”); while previously non-electronic genres such as reggae also took up the aesthetic (Sleng Teng), but nowhere was this man/machine love affair so strong as in acid house (“I Got a Big Dick”).
Several of these compositions are WMCs.
See also: The Electronic Revolution.
Man, it took me a long time to get the integrated circuit vs segregation joke.
a good one, no?
I hope you’ll forgive me for being the pedantic Kraftwerk-head…
It was actually The Model which went to no. 1 in the UK, after it appeared on the B-side of Computer Love and then got a re-release of its own. I was one of those that bought the single at the time. And strictly speaking, Computer Love is a song about searching for love via a computer (“I need a data date”), a very prescient forerunner of internet dating.
You are of course forgiven and I hope others will forgive my sweeping generalizations,
And to be pedantic about my own post: Kraftwerk probably used machinery which did not use integrated circuits, but probably analogue synths.
J
Jack Kilby? I hope not too many gimcrack readers read jahsonic as well as I’m about to blow my cover. this is an extremely close relation of mine…. not quite a Jack but almost
http://www.jakekilby.com/home.html
Mon pere is an electrical engineer. I grew up with the integrated circuit. Reading an MIT history of modern computing, I was amused to recognize names that were treated as luminaries of the engineering field that I knew only as curse words from my rather dyspeptic father.
No, you’re right about the integrated aspect of their music. The Roland Micro Composer had just appeared around this time and Kraftwerk were using it on stage and in the studio. This was a very simple digital sequencer that could store complicated rhythms in its memory which would then trigger analogue instruments.