Erstellt am: 28. 10. 2009 - 11:08 Uhr

Today's Webtip: Planet Rock

it's what you get when Afrika Bambaataa and Kraftwerk spend a hot sweaty night together.

As an early sufferer of sleeplessness, I spent a lot of time riding the radiowaves. Most of the local FM fare was pretty standard 80's top 40, which meant a lot of Radio Gaga and Lonseome Loser. Every now and then I might get lucky with something from the King Biscuit Flower Hour or Doctor Demento but most of the time it was pretty hopeless.

And then one night as I was rolling the dial up and down I heard what I could have sworn was some Kraftwerk. At that time I only knew about the band because of a 90 minute cassette full of current german music that had made it's way from a friends older brother into the hands of my circle of music geeks. I knew less than nothing about most of the tracks on that tape, but one thing I DID know was that our radio stations weren't going to be playing it.

So I stopped to listen.

And it was one of the most amazing things I ever remember hearing. As in, I can still vividly remember my reaction to the song. I have loved a lot of music in my time, but there are only one or two songs that I can actually remember hearing for the first time.

Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force was one of them.

I am assuming it was sometime around 1982, because I know I was in Junior High at the time, and now I know that the track had been ripping up the charts in more civilized locations that year.

Stuck in a suburb of Minneapolis, massively underage and unable to find any access to that particular music scene I had now way of knowing what I had just heard.

But now I have the internet, my time-machine of choice, and I can go back and see the video that was made way back in the day.

And things is good.