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Authentic Replicants:Brothers between Decades between Kraftwerk(s).

In this chapter I invited Robert Wilsmore to discuss our comparative appreciation and 'use' of Kraftwerk as teenagers, as opposed to that of our older brothers. This also then charts a shift in the group's commercial standing from the experimental works of the early 1970s to the popular hits of the early 1980s and as such our sense of authenticity in listening to them. I was interested in the correlation of my emerging tastes as a young teenager with the advent of my first independent travel (at least in the absence of my parents) and the need for recognition by others (peers and my brother). I was reminded of Allen Moore’s excellent article dealing with questions of the authentic in respect of popular music. This exploration of authenticity then serves to extend my research into constructions of identity, belonging and rejection, considering claim and assignation. That is to say that this chapter also deals in the assignation of authenticity between siblings and the manner in which this might be index to a crucial and yet quite paradoxical shift in the authenticity of Kraftwerk between Autobahn and Computer World; it also marks a shift between the 1970s and the 1980s, between the musical and cultural investment of an elder and younger brother as listeners who attempt claims of authenticity but suffer accusations of inauthenticity by elder siblings, as observers and participants in a time caught in the uneasy coexistence of a decaying modernity and emergent postmodernism.