That [the music's] apparent simplicity was achieved through considerable complexity of thought and practice is one of the many contradictions that Uwe Schütte explores in this highly stimulating critical biography ... a pleasure to read ... Constructing a personal biography of Kraftwerk would be extremely difficult, and Schütte takes the group on its own terms—writing clearly about each phase in its existence, with digressions into subjects such as Joseph Beuys, Warhol, the history of machine music, and the role of trains in the Holocaust. Most of all, his book sent me back to those core eight albums.

... a captivating social history ... This provocative and stimulating, yet readable narrative unearths the social and musical importance of an iconic band, both for general readers and fans.

Schütte’s attention to the visual elements of Kraftwerk is one of the book’s strengths. He shows many of the band’s artistic influences, from El Lissitzky to Andy Warhol. And the visual angle fits the arc of Kraftwerk’s long history ... The book does justice to the importance of the visual artist Emil Schult, the group’s long-time collaborator and unofficial fifth member, who designed many of Kraftwerk’s album covers ... Schütte, who grew up in Germany, gives a granular sense of the specifically German aspects of Kraftwerk’s context ... Schütte also parses German terms closely, explaining at length why all English translations of industrielle Volksmusik, the term Kraftwerk coined to describe their music, are unsatisfactory ... This sort of cultural translation is generally helpful, although at times the book reads like a careless, over-literal translation from German ... There is a valid point to be made about reflexive stereotypes in early UK and US media coverage of Kraftwerk, but here, Schütte does not make it well. Elsewhere, the book is marred by dismissiveness and curmudgeonly gripes.

This book does not initially exude promise. For one thing, it is written in a lightly retouched academese that makes few concessions to a popular audience. Schütte expects his readers to know the surnames of obscure cultural critics who continually pop up in the text like old friends. For another, he refuses to indulge in what he calls 'gossip' about the band, and what an irredeemable philistine such as muggins here would think of as basic biographical information. Kraftwerk’s oeuvre is to be taken at face value and deep artistic intent read into their every decision. This seems a bit much ... Despite the author’s reluctance to dirty his hands with trivia, there are flashes of appealing anecdote ... As a primer on the band’s music, the book is pretty good. Outside 19th-century travel guides, few subjects have given rise to such a volume of execrably bad writing as electronic music. Schütte, by contrast, is admirably precise about what he likes, and excellent value on Kraftwerk’s often derided later work, which he describes as a permanent process of remixing and updating. It would have been nice to have had a less hagiographic reckoning with the actual albums, though.

An appropriately chilly and brainy history of the pioneering German electronic group ... What the book lacks in personal insight, though, it makes up for with the author’s well-researched understanding of the thinking behind their music ... A more intimate and thorough band biography would be welcome, but intimacy was never Kraftwerk’s long suit. A well-turned introduction to a band whose sleek surfaces belied complicated ideas.