Welcome! For my first posting, I’ll be doing an article on a musical piece called “Computer Love” based on all the information I could cull from the “information superhighway.”
The first action that I took was to look the song “Computer Love” up on Wikipedia. I decided that I like using wikipedia to look up whatever info I come to be interested with from anime to computer science, so I started there as a way to get on a good path. The first thing wikipedia actually did was disambiguate my query with three choices. The three choices were:
- "Computer Love (Zapp & Roger song) - song by Zapp & Roger”,
- "Computer Love (Kraftwerk song) - song by Kraftwerk”, and
- "Computer Love is also as song by the band Eruption” (from Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia).
I was caught off-guard a little by this. The 3 bands depicted, however gave a good range of musical styles…. Zapp & Roger, according to wikipedia, are a funk and R&B group, as are the band Eruption in the other prompt. What was especially interesting was that the “computer love” by Zapp & Roger was such a big production. Wikipedia showed that the song featured vocals from another band (Shirley Murdock and Charlie Wilson of the Gap Band), and that the singer for Zapp & Roger, Roger Troutman (who started out as the founder of the Zapp band, according to Wikipedia) integrated a Peter Frampton-esque talk box into the song. Even more significant, however, would be that the song charted in the Billboard charts, became the band’s most memorable song, was remixed by many R&B/hip-hop musicians like as Fabolous, Jay-Z, Papoose, Lil Boosie, 40 Cal and Mike Jones and also covered by more famous artists like 2Pac (from Wikipedia).
What especially keyed me in, however, was that one of the 3 choices - the version of “Computer Love” by the band Kraftwerk – was an electronica song. The reason for this flag in my head was that the song played in my Computers & Culture class (for those reading this outside of my class, we were played a song to start us on a research journey) sounded like an electronic or new age-type song (or perhaps new wave, which according to Wikipedia, influenced Krautrock and Electronic Music in Germany, two genres of which Kraftwerk is a part).
According to Wikipedia, the Kraftwerk song is about “finding love through a computer.” Sadly, this turned out to be very vague information. Although Wikipedia did have a good bit on information on Kraftwerk as a band, (They, as stated before, are a Grammy-award nominated Krautrock/ Electronic band from Dusseldorf, Germany that features lots of catchy, synthesized melodies and harmonies, with Synth player Ralf Hutter as their primary composer and producer, as well as founder of the band, although later he went into a coma after suffering a bicycle accident, according to Wikipedia), that is not what I wanted. I did, however, get some great clues. According to Wikipedia, “computer love” (hereafter CL) was covered by the group “the Album Leaf” as a hidden track on their 2001 EP In an Off-White Room, and also by the group Glass Candy on the compilation After Dark. Even more significant was that the theme of CL was used by the mega-hit British group COLDPLAY in their 2005 song Talk from the album X&Y! I decided that since Coldplay is such a big hit, having been mocked by Stephen Colbert as the ONLY band that Rolling Stone covers, that this factoid would lead me deeper into the history of the CL song I heard in class, but first, I needed to hear all these versions of the song.
I went on YouTube and did a search for “Kraftwerk CL” and found many different versions of the song in video form with the full 7:00 track intact. The song was fun to listen to, but even more interesting were the comments that people left about the song. According to one of the YouTube users, jadedcreature: “this song can easily be about internet hookups..talk about being way ahead of its tim(sic)!!!,” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVU50c-EQhc&feature=related). This inspired me to look on blogs for other comments on the song. the music section of a website called www.ram.org (http://www.ram.org/music/reviews/kraftwerk.html) featured commentary on Kraftwerk’s three albums, Autobahn, Electric Café and In the Mix, and had a snippet of some of the lyrics from CL:
"Another lonely night, stare at the TV screen.
I don't know what to do. I need a rendezvous.
Computer love..."
---Kraftwerk, Computer Love (from http://www.ram.org/music/reviews/kraftwerk.html)
as well as some commentary on the album Autobahn that sums up the style of Kraftwerk’s music: “The pioneers of more than one genre of music, this group is at its vintage best in this album which is really dominated by its title track. The best thing about these guys is that it's done in crisp-sounding German (or English, when they do speak it). Contrast that to the strongly synthesiser-backed melody; it sounds as though tradition and technology are clashing and that's exactly what industrial music is all about.” (from http://www.ram.org/music/reviews/kraftwerk.html). I found this to be a very good, although short comment, on the nature of Kraftwerk’s music, which I believe sums up what I did indeed think was the interesting mix of industrial synthesizers with the whimsical music sound that came from the song as I listened to it on YouTube.
I wanted to hear the song again before I went on, but then I decided to try a different music service – Pandora, which was recommended to my class by our professor. When I typed CL into the Pandora music service, it gave me a “radio station” that played music (track by track songs that could be skipped but otherwise similar to a radio station) with “R&B influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, Extensive vamping, Heavy syncopation and minor key tonality.” I could tell from the “R&B influences” right off the bat that this “radio station” on Pandora’s Music Genome Project was going to play songs similar to the Zapp & Roger version of CL, so I instead decided to create a Pandora “radio station” by typing into the prompt “Kraftwerk.” This action would give me a station playing tracks with “house roots, four-on-the-floor beats, new wave influences, a rhythmic intro and use of modal harmonies.” Among the songs that ended up being featured on this Pandora station were Kraftwerk’s own “Titanium,” off their “Tour de France” album, “Touch” by Wolfsheim, “Trans-Europe Express” by the 8-Bit Receptors and “Remind Me” by Royksopp. Listening to these songs gave me an idea of the broader genre’s characteristics of which CL is a part, and also equipped me with words to attach to what I was hearing. For indeed, CL and Krautwerk seemed to have Duran Duran-like New Wave qualities, and since the synthesizer produces such a precise volume, it can be seen that the modality of the harmony and drum beats (2-2-1-2-2-2-1) is where the music gets its minor quality despite not being as loud as, say, heavy metal. Still, the problem with Pandora was that it did not let me listen directly to “Computer Love” due to licensing issues, so I had to look elsewhere to hear the song in a form other than a YouTube video.
My next step was to head on to the Rhapsody services.
Doing a search for CL on Rhapsody was also an experience indeed! Searching for CL on Rhapsody gave me 37 hits, many more than the original 3 that I got on Wikipedia. Among the hits that I got for CL were songs of the same name by DJ Spinna, Broke Box, Bass Funk, Velva Blu, Slipstream, Charlie Wilson (performed with Zapp & Roger, according to Wikipedia) Glass Candy (the After Dark cover, according to Wikipedia), Goldee Heart, Zapp and Roger, Zapp alone (Roger Troutman’s Solo Band, according to Wikipedia), Natho, Glass Candy again (this time on an album called “Beat Box”), Gwem and Counter Reset, Box Saga, Kraftwerk themselves, DJ Screw, Datarock (called “Computer Camp Love”), Perrey & Kingsley (“Computer in Love”), YACHT (“I Love A Computer”), Bad Religion (“I Love My Computer”), Udi Kagan (“Love Me Computer”) and Ninja Academy (“Robot falls in Love,” not completely related?). After listening to some of these songs, some very funny, some very dramatic (Perrey & Kingsley stand out as dramatic while the Bad Religion song stands out as funny), I found that the Glass Candy versions from “After Dark” and Beat Box” were both the same as the version of the song that I heard in class! Both the After Dark compilation and the Beat Box compilation were done in 2007, with the latter being described as Glass Candy’s true foray into the music world, full of adrenaline and giving the impression that the band had finally come into its own and was not longer in the “genesis” stage (Andrew Gaerig, 12/3/07, http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/47234-beatbox). The power of this band, Glass Candy, gives even greater kudos to the influence of the song they covered, CL, since Kraftwerk’s version came out all the way back in 1981 on Kling Klang & EMI records! (from Wikipedia, “Computer Love”).
Searches on allmusic.com and musicbrainz.com (considered by one blogger, Keith Devens @ Keith Devens.com, to be “the IMDB of music” each respectively), show even more results for performers who have done songs named “computer love,” including Q Project, Octex, Convox, Marsheaux and Tre allegri ragazzi morti, to name a few….
So what is the significance, culturally, of this song called “Computer Love,” and Why study it in a class on Computers and Culture?
This song, with electronic band Kraftwerk’s rendition as the stand-out since it uses computers to generate the music, is extremely important conceptually to our culture! This song, as the YouTube user I quoted earlier stated, basically predicted the use of computers and their ability it interconnect through the internet as a means to find love, which is a very logical prediction that has come to fruition in a big way. Nowadays, people frequent social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut and the like by the millions, and people even use computers directly to find love through websites like eHarmony and chemistry.com (even economics and competition are already playing apart as those faceless entities we like to call “corporations” try to stake their claim against all the start-up smaller companies in the new frontier for capitalism known as cyberspace, as shown by Google taking over YouTube, but that’s another story), and so we see that computers have definitely become a tool for finding love, which is something that was not all too common in Kraftwerk’s 1981, when they wrote the song “computer love”! But even more so, people don’t always find love through their computers, sometimes they find love with their computers! MMORPGs and other online computer games like EverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies allow people to all-out take on another identity with everything from new personality traits to combat abilites so that they may become something they have dreamed of becoming, and thus become so engulfed in the life that they find the virtual world better for them than the real world! Indeed, now they have fallen in love with the computer, not through the computer! This is a theme echoed in Japanese anime as well, with shows like Chobits being prominent examples of the things that emerging robot technologies that also use computers may one day be capable of in terms of, well, love! Indeed the future is now so close – if “computer love” was predicted in 1981, what can be foreseen in 2008?
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