In an interview with Dan Sicko, the late author of Techno Rebels: The Renegades Of Electronic Funk, former Kraftwerk percussionist Karl Bartos gives an essential statement on the influence of black R&B on the band's work: “We were all fans of American music: soul, the Tamla/Motown thing, and of course, James Brown. We always tried to make an American rhythm feel, with a European approach to harmony and melody.” When exploring the band’s early work, this rhythmic influence does occasionally peek its head up through their abstract sound. On “Tone Float” (the title track from founder members Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleben’s pre-Kraftwerk 1970 debut album as members of Organisation), the band can be heard experimenting with a rhythmic framework similar to the “Bo Diddley'' beat, the heavily accented drum pattern that dominated rock ’n’ roll in the 50s and early 60s. For their first release as Kraftwerk, the “Bo Diddley” beat remerges, albeit with an aggressive Jazz flair courtesy of drummer Charly Weiss providing the driving pulse for the the album’s ten minute closer “Vom Himmel Hoch”. In 1974, both Kraftwerk and James Brown delivered “Autobahn” and “Papa Don’t Take No Mess”, two landmark releases that each stretched their subdued, mid-tempo grooves and repetitive conceptual lyrics across extended ten minute plus running times. By 1977, Kraftwerk had fully developed their practice of fusing European electronic music with black American rhythms, forging an aesthetic that reached critical mass with the release of Trans Europe Express.

The creation and subsequent impact of Afrika Bambaataa And The Soulsonic Force’s 1982 watershed release “Planet Rock” has been well documented. For years, Bambaataa had been dropping cuts from electronic acts as various as Gary Numan and Yellow Magic Orchestra in his DJ sets for predominantly black audiences. Of the quirky, forward-thinking electronic acts that he championed, none had a deeper impact on Bambaataa’s own work than Kraftwerk. When Bambaataa entered the studio to record “Planet Rock” sometime in 1981 along with The Soulsonic Force, DJ/producer Arthur Baker and producer/drum-programmer John Robie, his mission was clear: he wanted to take bits of Kraftwerk’s Pan-European opus “Trans-Europe Express”, fuse it with his own global futurist and Pan-African sensibilities. Baker was familiar with and a fan of Kraftwerk through his work as a DJ. Indeed he recalled in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy the surreal feeling of “sitting in the housing projects and hearing that (“Trans-Europe Express”) reverberating off of the buildings” while he worked a day job sweeping floors. Bambaataa wanted to take a cue from the sound of Kraftwerk and put it in a new context.

By melding the dramatic, sweeping string melody of “Trans-Europe Express” with a drum groove inspired by Captain Sky’s 1978 disco-funk jam “Super Sporm” and played on a Roland TR-808, Bambaataa and crew created a rich musical hybrid whose influence still reverberates today. As we’ve seen, despite its novelty, this fusion of synth melodies inspired by European classical and heavy African American rhythms was not new. In fact, it was a synthesis that lived at the heart of Kraftwerk’s music. In his book Kraftwerk, Man, Machine And Music, Pascal Bussy highlights the ongoing nature of this musical dialogue, detailing that when the band visited the US to work with Francois Kevorkian, they became inspired by black club DJs like Larry Levan and others who were playing their music.

In interviews around the time, Bambaataa also quoted Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, and Yellow Magic Orchestra as main influences. This interest in Kraftwerk from the black hip hop scene did much to revive the German group’s career in the US. Indeed, while in New York to mix some tracks with Kevorkian, Hütter and Schneider discovered for themselves that some of the people that had remained most faithful to Kraftwerk were the black DJs. So just as Kraftwerk were an enormous influence on these DJs, so the club dance music of the early 1980s influenced them. From this moment on they became increasingly aware of the black music scene, and their own work took on a distinctly more danceable or club-wise edge. In fact, Hütter once told his friend Boris Venzen, “Our music is good if blacks and whites can dance to it at the same time.”

As “Planet Rock” stormed out of New York’s clubs, radios and boomboxes, it seeded the birth of several regional micro-genres like freestyle in the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn, bass in Miami, and electro in Los Angeles, The group’s influence took a particularly strong hold in Detroit with Urban radio DJs Like Electrifying Mojo introducing the European electronic sound to the generation of black youth that went on to create techno. In recent years, several clips have been uploaded of The Scene (and its spin-off The New Dance Show), a Soul Train-style dance show that aired from 1975–87 on Detroit’s WGPR TV 62. In these videos, black youth from Detroit can be seen dancing to Kraftwerk and a variety of progressive electronic dance music, giving us a glimpse into Detroit’s scene at the time.

In the decades since “Planet Rock”, sampling has played a crucial role in keeping Kraftwerk’s music alive in hiphop and dance music. Even beyond the direct samples of “Trans-Europe Express”, “Numbers”, “Tour De France”, “The Hall Of Mirrors” and other Kraftwerk classics that have shown up in countless tracks, the group's aesthetic fingerprints have been left all over black American music. It would be hard to imagine the icy vocal delivery and minimal electronic beats of Chicago acid house classics like Adonis’s “No Way Back” or Detroit club classics like A Number Of Names’ “Sharevari”, Cybotron’s “Clear”, Aux 88’s “My Aux Mind” and Model 500’s “No UFOs” without Kraftwerk’s influence. Drexciya’s Afrofuturist mythology took inspiration from Kraftwerk’s own penchant for using albums as a platform for building imagined futures and alternate realities. Elsewhere, DC go-go pioneers Trouble Funk’s 1982 track “Trouble Funk Express” combines Kraftwerk’s melody with the lively syncopated beat of go-go. Staying true to his Detroit roots, Rapper/Producer J Dilla paid tribute to Kraftwerk both on his own oddball solo cut “BBE (Big Booty Express)” and through his production work on Common’s electro-psychedelic curveball, Electric Circus. Looking at the many ways in which Kraftwerk were influenced by and in turn influenced black music, it would be difficult to deny that for decades, the group have engaged in a significant dialogue with black American music.

Thanks to innovators like Sly Stone, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder and others, drum machines and synthesizers have been employed in black music since these instruments were first developed, and it stands to reason that electronics would’ve been fully integrated into black music with or without Kraftwerk’s influence. Yet, in the immediate years following the release of Computer World and Kraftwerk’s visit to NYC, R&B and rap music in particular were in the process of transition from the disco/live band era, and stepping into an era marked by fully electronic production and instrumentation. This conceptual and practical leap was made easier by Kraftwerk’s influence. Stylistically, the group had added an icy European chill to the burning heat of black American music.The result being a powerful combination of two different cultural modes of expression and two very distinct visions of utopia.

This dialogue between Kraftwerk and black American music was revived in honour of Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider, who died of cancer on 30 April at the age of 73