Song of the Day 4/13: Kraftwerk, “Computer Love”

OK, from now on the tariff on Chinese goods is … eleventy jillion percent! Oh, wait, hold on a sec … um, except for smartphones and computers and stuff like that. We didn’t mean computers! That’s so crazy that you thought we meant computers! We love computers!

So does Kraftwerk. If that wasn’t clear from their electronic approach on their first seven albums, they spelled it out for listeners with 1981’s “Computer World,” a concept album about the machines’ takeover of daily life. For context, the hot item on the fledgling personal computer market was IBM’s Commodore 64, which loosed MS-DOS upon the world. The album even has a song about pocket calculators, which were a few years old but cheaper than ever.

Despite Kraftwerk’s vast influence on all the electronic music that followed, the group sold few records in the U.S. They were more popular in their native Germany and especially in the UK, where “Computer Love” was a No. 1 single.