Pop music is a unique(like) system of self-references.

This can be wonderfully demonstrated in the relationship between the German sound artist Karl Bartos and his role models and epigones.

He bolstered Kraftwerk as the band swung from elegiac to industrial electronics.

She went on to transform simple pop formulas from the Beatles, Funkadelic, the Beach Boys or Johnny "Guitar" Watson into a machine-dehumanized form of digital music.

Philip Krohn

Editor in business, responsible for "People and Business".

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Five years later, US hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa picked up the rhythmic guidelines he used in 1977's "Trans Europa Express" for his first hit "Planet Rock".

When Bartos left the Düsseldorf formation after a decade and a half, he remixed this track in his new musical guise, Elektrik Music.

Copy, self-copy, new art.

Karl Bartos divided his 16 years in the most influential German music group almost optimally over the band's history.

He joined Kraftwerk after a few years of experimenting and finding their sound with producer Conny Plank.

When the then trio had just released their first masterpiece "Autobahn" in 1974, he shaped the following five groundbreaking and internationally acclaimed albums.

He left the formation when it focused on cycling, managing fame and becoming a museum.

Almost a quarter of his 70-year-old life this Tuesday.

His works as a solo artist and in new formations are remarkable in every respect.

No other German musician who emerged from the environment of Kraut innovators has taken on the role of mentor for his admirers so intensively.

He has worked with English musicians such as Bernard Sumner (Joy Division, New Order), Johnny Marr (The Smiths), Andy McClusky (OMD) and the Pet Shop Boys.

With the exception of Marr, the music of each of these musicians would have sounded very different without the power plant of the Bartos years - yes, they would not have been inspired to electronic music in this way if he had not helped to invent this sound.

The compositions he released from the mid-1990s onwards have a wider range than one might expect for electronic musicians.

He never wanted to comply with the requests of record labels to bring old sketches onto the market alone, he always created fresh works that only partially tie in with the Kraftwerk sounds of the 1970s and early 1980s.

One of the few German Britpop albums

His collaboration with Marr and Sumner sounds like the euphoric Britpop of the time.

And that it wasn't an accident, he confirmed with the album "Electric Music" (on which he sings very well, genuinely) and songs like "Sunshine" or "Call on me".

German Britpop like you hardly ever heard before.

Last year, when Kraftwerk was the first German band to be inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (not in the Artists category, but Early Influences, which also brings together many jazz and blues artists who are important for rock are), because of all these merits, it was also this classic quartet and not just the original formation (as with other bands) that was honored: Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos.

The tributes to musicians like Depeche Mode and LCD Soundsystem were hymn-like.

On the same occasion, Tina Turner, Gil Scott-Heron (also in the Early Influences category) and Todd Rundgren were added to this pop lineage.

Names that give a sense of what league Bartos played in with his comrades-in-arms.

Also among early influences are Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson and Louis Armstrong.

Although he was born in Marktschellenberg in the Berchtesgadener Land, he is one of the ancestors of the Düsseldorf music scene.

He studied piano, vibraphone and drums at the Robert Schumann University.

Before joining Kraftwerk, he played with Marius Müller-Westernhagen and Bodo Staiger, who later formed Rheingold, whose band member Lothar Manteuffel was then his partner on Elektrik Music's first album.

He later taught auditory media design as a guest professor in the Sound Studies course at the University of the Arts in Berlin.

He was a member of the jury at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival and submitted a contribution himself.

His 2013 album "Off The Record" is the most consistent work of his solo career and again very much in the style of "Computerwelt" and "Mensch Maschine".

Pop pioneer Karl Bartos turns 70 this Tuesday.