The Man Machine

Having read the Kraftwerk interview on The Guardian a few days ago, I felt I had to pen my own piece of wisdom. The Man Machine, of course, stayed it’s course in the musical consciousness of those who grew up in the 80s- like myself. Curiously, it was launched in my infancy and it could have only been the pirated cassette network(Free School Street, Calcutta) which brought it to us so late. However, it was another piece of work-The Model-which became synonymous with the group-and it came from an earlier album. An ironic tribute to the consumerist industry of beauty, it provides a glimpse into desire in a tradition that goes back to Josef Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel.  The Model is a medium inside a medium inside a medium- the stage show, the camera, the magazine, the television, the music and finally the music video-and now, the music video on Youtube. By 1977, Europe and America were slipping into the post 60s intellectual desert . There was a lingering whiff of critique in the air but Duran Duran wasn’t far away with it’s 1980s pap. The atmosphere in the video crawls with foreboding behind the upbeat music-desire is manifested in the phallic camera and the clawlike chandelier hanging over the model’s head. The model is human but also an image-the media is what creates her and the desire for her- without the media and the industry of fashion, she is nothing -she is not there and the music itself has no purpose. The desire to meet her is heart-rendering in it’s futility- the singer knows this creation is always so out of reach. By the 1980s, the winter of discontent had been irrevocably banished and you could listen to “True” and “Relax”. Arthur Penn summed up the despair of creativity with his “Dead of Winter” and films like Red Dawn were coming through. The turn back to intellectual provocation, curiously would come with the Terminator, which despite all else I hail as a great work of critique(admittedly reductionist in it’s approach) but also from SiliconValley(1984, Apple-anyone?). But for a number of years,the Man Machine and The Model would stand at  the peak of what continued critique could have brought us in creative excellence. What we did get was La Isla Bonita. Well, you can’t always win.