Yahoo Autos How One Man Became KRAFTWERK
This is way better than McLOVIN. David Sanborn is just a guy who works in an office and drives a car and eats food and goes to sleep at night in a bed and is absolutely, unassailably obsessed with the musical stylings of German electronic group Kraftwerk.
Sanborn may have recently moved to Florida, but has had enough time to have his brain fried by the Florida sun, which is why he decided it'd be a perfectly sensible idea to head down to the DMV dressed as the band's seminal 1978 work The Man Machine and give his name to The Beaucratic Machine as "KRAFTWERK."
Florida Man and his reign of terror continues unabated.
"They're a legendarily secretive band," explained Sanborn: "a musical Thomas Pynchon that never grants interviews, doesn't sign autographs backstage, doesn't let the world know they're mortals who put their pants on one leg at a time. It's maddening. They want us to think they'd been plucked from the wreckage of a UFO and I'm not buying it. I wanted the world to see their mundane side-and there's no place on planet Earth more mundane than the DMV."
It's not hard to become KRAFTWERK. You need to shave off your beard first. (We are The Robots and therefore have no use for facial proclivities.) Then, you need to don a red shirt, black tie, dye your hair and slick it all the way back, look as pale and smooth as possible (again, Die Roboter) The DMV didn't notice.
Sanborn gave his real name for the license, but Photoshopped the name and signature to read KRAFTWERK. Cheating? Hardly-even Florida has a breaking point. "I'm still the same smooth jazz, Tampa-based David Sanborn I've always been," he said.
The Photoshopped driver's license, along with the red and black get-up, was enough to generate instant Internet infamy. Sanborn, or KRAFTWERK, as he shall now be severly known to the post-industrial world, found himself plastered across the wide world of music journalism from around the world. "Here's a sampling: legendary British music journal New Musical Express. The EDM friendly MixMag. Orlando's own Weekly. Canada's Exclaim. Something in regards to Magnetism. The best beats are usually Electronic Beats. Stoney and His Beats. Our favorite city where women stand under red lights and beckon you into questionable situations, Amsterdam. Deutschland's Shortnews…"
KRAFTWERK spent the rest of the day doing all the mundane stuff Kraftwerk doesn't do. KRAFTWERK drove around Tampa, ate a sandwich, looked quizzically at a duck, bought some Kraftwerk music, and fueled up a 1998 Subaru Outback. Meanwhile, Kraftwerk sleeps neoprene neon suits cocooned inside gleaming metallic pods stored miles underneath Berlin Hauptbahnhof, awaiting the next experimental art-event gallery festival inside an abandoned power station where the most influential band in the world can once again be called upon to serve as musikarbeiter.
For that matter, The Man-Machine also rides a motorcycle and is an organ donor.
"I'll pass the DMV soul-sucking challenge along to you," Sanborn concludes. "Make your photos noteworthy, live a little. You're going to be stuck with it for a long, long time."
Images via Flickr
