"Autobahn" is a pioneering song in the "electro pop" genre; it was the first song in that style to chart in both the UK and US. Using vocoders, synths and other electronic instruments, Kraftwerk gave rise to the British new romantic movement, hip-hop and techno.
The album version is 22-minutes long and was intended to reproduce a journey on the motorway. Band member Ralf Hutter recorded the passing cars in the background by dangling a microphone out of his old grey Volkswagen window as it traveled down an autobahn. However, these recordings were not suitable for the song, so they recreated the car sounds using synthesizers.
Autobahn is the German word for a major high-speed road usually linking one or more cities and towns, similar to motorway or freeway in English-speaking countries. In the 1920s the Weimar Republic built the first autobahns on a limited scale. Shortly after the 1933 Nazi takeover, Hitler enthusiastically embraced an ambitious autobahn construction project and soon over 100,000 laborers were working at construction sites all over Germany. These autobahns formed the first high-speed road network in the world.
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