It’s 3 p.m.! Let The A.V. Club briefly make use of the waning hours of your productivity with some pop culture ephemera pulled from the depths of YouTube.
American culture is a behemoth, cramming Big Macs and Dungarees into the mouths of everyone in the entire world, so it can be nice to take a step back and recognize that nobody really needs us and that not everything needs to be targeted specifically at us—or even anywhere remotely close to us. To that end, here’s a clip of German electronic band Kraftwerk appearing on Italian TV in 1981 to perform a version of the song “Pocket Calculator” in Italian. Kraftwerk songs, like most electronic music, are often heavy on the bleeps and the boops, and that’s especially true for a version of “Pocket Calculator” in which you (most likely) don’t understand the language. It lets you truly appreciate the music being played, particularly because the very-’80s aesthetics don’t allow any room for the big, multimedia experiences that Kraftwerk does on stage now.
Also, this version is way better than the original.
