Kraftwerk, Die Mensch/Maschine (The Man/Machine)

Kraftwerk. Die Mensch/Maschine (The Man/Machine). (Slashes indicate raised dots in original.) Electrola, 1C058-32843, 1978.

Includes "Die Roboter," "Spacelab," "Metropolis," and "Die Mensch / Maschine." Album described legitimately in Blue Angel, Inc., catalog as "Teutonic Techno-Rock." In addition to the "mechanical" aspects to the music, note the album cover and the pictures on the record jacket and labels. The cover gives the album's title in German, Russian, English, and French; the last is both a famous phrase in French and the title of a 1748 work by Julien Offroy de la Mettrie arguing the rigorously materialistic thesis that human beings are machines (see under Background entries for D. Hofstadter, The Mind's I,[1] and J. Smart on "Materialism"[2]). The pictures suggest both S. Sontag's "technocratric" men in "Imagination of Disaster" (see under Drama Criticism[3]) and a combined alumni of Hitler Youth and the more decadent cabarets of the Weimar Republic. See in this Category, P. Townshend's The Iron Man, Owl's song "Man Machines."