(1977, EMI Records)
The older guy I worked with when I was like 16 (he was like ten years older, not creepy child perv older) who convinced me doing acid would be a good thing was a strong influence on me back then. I used to go to his house and we'd smoke weed while his wife would be kinda weirded out by it, and we'd all watch Reverend Gene Scott on the satellite (back when they were big giant slow-turning dishes). He ended up giving me a couple hundred records, just to get rid of them. This was one of them. At the time, I had no idea of it's strong influence on early rap music, specifically Afrika Bambaataa. I was a young kid who liked drugs and making mixtapes, so throwing "Hall of Mirrors" in the mix with all it's strange German blip-blooping and echoey vocals was trippy, brah.
Years later, knowing the history of hip hop music, or even electronic music in general, and what a crazy pioneering force those weird straight-laced looking four white dudes on the cover of this Kraftwerk joint were, I hold the album dear. But I hardly ever listen to it. You could strap a couple of early '90s pagers to your ears with a bandana and call them with your cellphone on speaker mode to get the basic Kraftwerk sound. It's just weird German blips and bloops, and I don't trust German things. I have always held this belief that anything really popular in New York City and Berlin is something I want as far away from me as possible; that's the two-pronged spike of societal degeneracy for me. And I have no problem finding something creepy about Bronx-based Bambaataa being all about some fucked-up German-based Kraftwerk. But I can look beyond that. Mostly because the cover is funny, and I still like to cull samples from the album, and still throw "Hall of Mirrors" into mixes. "Even the greatest stars... discover themselves in the looking glass." Seriously, that's the greatest creepy-assed song ever, and the fact no one has made some tweaked-out post-apocalyptic movie with that in the soundtrack as the flick's nemesis is riding through the wasteland in his super destruction machine.
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