Here's a great car song, though this one isn’t about the car as a metaphor for sex; it’s about the car as a metaphor for freedom—or, rather, it’s the car as a conduit for music, which is used as a metaphor for freedom. Or vice-versa. Or a combination of all these factors: car, music, freedom, and love, each completing a circuit, directing and re-directing one another, the circuit not complete unless all factors are moving concurrently.
The girl asks the guy to go away with her for the summer (an allusion, of course, to the Beach Boys and the California Dream), driving “…around with the top down/Stereo turned up loud/With the phat sound.” And it’s not just a Sunday afternoon drive, either; they won’t be driving ten miles per hour under the speed limit, looking at the porch on this house and the veranda on that one. Nope. That’s for old married couples, with their future already laid out for them.
This girl, our singer (Neneh Cherry...this time, as the Teddybears remade their own song here, letting Neneh warm up the colder atmosphere of the original), has no definite plans, but she knows that if she doesn’t think of something exciting, she’ll lose her man (who’s—she’s heard—is thinking of ditching her). And what—to young lovers—could be more exciting than driving around in a convertible, with the wind blowing through their hair, no responsibilities, music—but not just any music, and not some boring, overproduced rock album of pretentious ideas, play-by-numbers structure, and lacking in any musical imagination. She’s got her mp3 player plugged in, the party shuffle going, where exciting songs come from random subgenre after random subgenre*, and this song would surely pop up again and again, because the synth pops and pops, mimicking the bumps and potholes in the radio; the acoustic guitar and drums lay the steady beat, mimicking the rhythm of the road; the vocal dynamics rise and fall, mimicking propulsion; and the singer whispers into his ear (which means she let him drive), promising she’ll be his to keep—if he wants to. And under these conditions, who could say no?
*…like the way pop radio worked—for a very brief duration—during the early-to-mid eighties, when one could find records from artists as disparate as Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, R.E.M., Run D.M.C., U2, and Michael Jackson playing one after the other. Of course, that’s not the case anymore, not since Clear Channel Radio began to monopolize the airwaves, making the local DJs redundant, homogenizing the national radio landscape so that no matter where one is, one will here the same songs on the same playlists in the same order in any city in America. And before you begin your question, I’ll answer: No. Satellite radio is not the answer. It is an answer, but it doesn’t solve the problem—it just presents another one. Whether the choice is Clear Channel or Sirius, the problem remains the same: listeners are being forced to choose a format (rap, r&B, classic rock, nu-rock, etc…) rather than being given the best that radio has to offer all on one station. If you wanted the best, you…are straight out of luck. What’s the answer? We are. Let’s change the station.
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