“She’s just an American, riding a dream/When she’s got rainbow syrup and her heart that she bleeds/They don’t care if your papers or your love is the law/She’s a free soul burning roads with a flag in her bra”
— Lady Gaga’s “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)” (2011)
So I’ve named this blog post after two songs because…are you really American if you’ve never scream-sang at least one of them at a bar?
Okay, so Tom Cochrane, the man behind “Life is a Highway” (1991) is Canadian. But Canadians make American things all the time. Or they make things and we claim them.
Telephones! Alexander Graham Bell was Scottish-Canadian. He was just living in the US when he invented phones. Oh, and Basketball. Turns out the inventor of basketball was Canadian too. Peanut butter also. You probably think it was invented by the American George Washington Carver. Nope. A Canadian did that. Some guy named Marcellus Gilmore Edson had the OG patent. And really peanuts have been ground into a paste since the Aztecs. But we Americans like to claim things for our own, so let’s go ahead and claim “Life is a Highway.”
But we aren’t here to talk about peanut butter! We’re here to talk about cars and living our lives on those wide open roads! (Okay but one more thing: what country is the biggest provider of gasoline to America? You guessed it…CANADA). But back to cars.
Before we even get to life and its being a highway and our wanting to ride it all night long, let’s go back a bit. (I know, I keep putting off the point, but this is my blog! I can do what I want!)
Cars show up all over music. In fact, the song “Rocket 88,” by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (1951), which is often listed as one of the ‘first rock & roll songs,’ is all about cars. Actually, it’s about one car in particular: the Oldsmobile 88.
Touted as the first ‘muscle car,’ the Oldsmobile 88 basically got free advertising from Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. The car, which first went into production in 1949, had the early slogan “Make A Date with a Rocket 88.” With the song and the slogan, it’s easy to see the origin of car-as-sex-symbol in advertising.
“Rocket 88” is all about how the car does the work of pulling women for you. You don’t have to get into that messy business of flirting, just pull up in your Oldsmobile 88.
“V-8 Motor and this modern design
Black convertible top and the gals don't mind
Sportin' with me, ridin' all around town for joy
Blow your horn, baby, blow”
But are we really talking about a car here? I mean yes, you can blow a horn. I’m not so sure the origins of the term “blow job” and if the phrase was being used in 1951, but still there is a lot of blowing going on here.
(OK, I looked it up, and according to the Online Etymology Dictionary the ‘blow’ of blow job refers to the ‘explosive climax of orgasm.’ The oldest variation of this was used in 1933 among sex workers. So blow like finish, not blow like a horn. But still, there is overlap! I’ll argue it!)
My point is that a car means a lot more than just a vehicle to drive in. This is music after all and metaphor is key.
Just watch the first two ads to understand what I mean by “car-as-sex-symbol”
So in the song, yes, the woman is attracted to the car, but isn’t she also attracted to the power of it? This is a huge theme in car advertising. Cars as the physical embodiment of masculinity. Surely you’ve seen a guy driving an overly large truck and thought, ‘he must be compensating…’ Cars are an extension of manliness and sexual prowess. But also, a symbol of money for the very real reason that cars cost money.
Just look at TLC’s “No Scrubs” (1999): “A scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from me/Hangin’ out the passenger side/of his best friend’s ride/trying to holla at me.” No one wants a scrub! Everyone knows that.
Things haven’t changed much since “Rocket 88.” I mean fast forward about 50 years and you have Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me” (2000):
“If you want to go and take a ride with me
We 3-wheeling in the fo’ with the gold D’s
Oh why do I live this way? (Hey, must be the money!)
If you want to go and get high with me
Smoke a L in the back of the Benz-E
Oh why must I feel this way? (Hey must be the money!)”
There are more songs like this. Prince, “Little Red Corvette” (1999). Beatles, “Drive My Car” (1965). For a woman’s perspective, there’s Rihanna’s “Shut Up and Drive” (2007).
And this is by no means a comprehensive list!
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This is a thought I’m having while writing this, and it is very tangentially related, but I want to include it anyway (food for thought and all that): I'm convinced car guys and horse girls have a lot more in common than we all want to admit, only misogyny creates a stigma around the latter. Anyway back to the blog…
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Okay, but this is an environmental blog, so you’re thinking: what does sex appeal have to do with the environment?
I’ll answer that question with a question: is public transport sexy?
I’ll answer that question with an anecdote: It’s 2020, the day before COVID was declared a global pandemic. I’m riding the New York subway. No one is wearing masks (we didn’t know we had to!). I’m looking at a guy and really getting worried about him, he’s slumped over and there seems to be some form of liquid (bile or drool) spilling from his mouth. But the social contract of the subway, as I’ve been taught it, is “we don’t care about one another, we don’t look at one another,” so I’m not sure if I should be checking in with him.
Eventually, an earbud falls out of his ear, and onto the ground, and his phone drops too. And this guy is out, I mean out, out. He doesn’t notice. And then I’m sitting there thinking, oh boy, I should probably pick that guy's phone up and put it with him so it doesn’t get stolen. But then there's all this fluid around him, and COVID is rumored to be dangerous. Anyway, eventually, I think “fuck it, I would hate to lose my phone just because I passed out in the wrong place at the right time,” so I pick the phone up and put it with the guy. And a couple of my fellow passengers look at me like I’m crazy. But I’m not crazy, I’m just not a New Yorker! And sometimes you have to do un-sexy things for your fellow transport riders! And… okay I’ll cut that story off.
Skip to 9:40 in this video for a really good poem called “Funeral” about social isolation on public transport.
One more anecdote about public transport and this is short: I’m about to get on a subway car when I’m told it’s being evacuated because human feces has been found in it.
We Americans like our individuality, and we really like our individual bodily fluids to be kept in our individual spaces. That’s just how it goes.
I mean the only time I can really think: public transport = sex appeal is the scene in Risky Business where Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay have a little too much fun on the train.
I would like to make a quick plug for public transport though: beyond being so much more eco-friendly, it is one of the few spaces where people really have to be among one another. A businessman has to sit next to a guy who's sleeping on the train, not because he’s tired, but because he can’t afford an apartment. I don’t know… I guess I just think that’s important, that it has some kind of value in a world where we are increasingly siphoned off into our own little bubbles of class and race… I say this but then I ride the Chicago L from the northernmost stop to the southernmost stop and ask myself if public transport is really doing anything for integration… but this isn’t an essay about race and class is it? Trick question: environmentalism has everything to do with race and class. Just look at this article from the New York Times that tells us:
“In a large, continuing study of upward mobility based at Harvard, commuting time has emerged as the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty. The longer an average commute in a given county, the worse the chances of low-income families there moving up the ladder.”
A huge key to equality: the accessibility of public transport. Not everyone can buy a car and pay for maintenance…So kill two birds with one stone: give the people trains, lower emissions, and help with economic equality.
But this is a blog post, I’ll get off my leftist soap box and get back to business.
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The appeal of cars goes deeper than sex appeal. It’s also about the romanticization of road trips, cars as an escape, and cars as part of the American dream.
Look at Janis Joplin’s “Mercedez Benz” (released 1971, recorded on October 1st, 1970 in a single take).
The lyrics were inspired, at least in part, by the first line of a poem by beat writer Michael Mclure, which read “Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedez Benz.” It’s a short song—under two minutes.
The song is a tragedy in itself. Joplin died three days after recording it. There is something odd about listening to it. It feels very raw, with Joplin’s raspy voice singing the simple melody. Even her laughter comes as an odd sort of omen for listeners who know that death was creeping up on her.
She begins the song by stating, somewhat flippantly, “I’d like to do a song of great social and political import.” Then she launches into it. It’s something of a consumer’s prayer, asking God to buy her a Mercedes Benz/a color TV/ a night on the town.
A car is part of the American dream. Though sometimes I wonder if the American dream isn’t so much about what we buy, but that we can buy it. It’s not so much about the object, but the action of purchase. But for the purposes of this blog… the car is definitely part of the American dream.
This is largely because cars translate into status symbols, and we Americans have been taught that status is actually something we can buy. I mean, Joplin isn’t asking God for something practical, like a Toyota Corolla — no she wants the top-of-the-line. And it’s her God-given right to have it.
I would love to go off about NASCAR, the suburbs, the vast American infrastructure, and insert a whole chapter from James Howard Kunstler’s book “The Geography of Nowhere,” but instead I’ll just share a highlight on the subject of cars in America:
“There was nothing like it before in history: a machine that promised liberation from the daily bondage of place. And in a free country like the United States, with the unrestricted right to travel, a vast geographical territory to spread out into, and a national tradition of picking up and moving whenever life at home became intolerable, the automobile came as a blessing”
I’ll go ahead and use that as a transition into Tracy Chapman’s (lesbian anthem) “Fast Car” (1988) — a song that exemplifies “car as escape.”
The first line sums it up well “You got a fast car/I want a ticket to anywhere.” There it is: the dream to escape and access to a way out.
What I love about “Fast Car” is the narrative arc. At first, it’s about the narrator and her partner running away together to the city in search of new opportunities. Then it’s about aspiring for that American dream: “We’ll move out of the shelter/Buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs.” Then it’s about the loss of that earlier hope when the narrator’s partner ends up drinking and staying out all night.
But anyway, I’ll let you listen to the song yourself.
At its core, the song is all about that dream of escape from a bad situation into a better place.
You see the car as an embodiment of escape in that most American of American singers, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (1975). But I won’t go into that, here. I’ve already probably exhausted you with all this car talk, so let’s circle back.
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Now, after all that prologue…let’s return to where we started. (Think of this blog post as a road trip with lots of detours…) So, “Life is a Highway,” originally by our friend Tom Cochrane, who we met way back at the start of this journey, was covered by true Americans, Rascal Flatts in 2005 for the movie Cars. Their cover landed one rank below where Cochrane’s original stood on the Billboard Hot 100. It was wildly successful. So successful, that when you google “Life is a Highway” it’s their version that comes up first. (See, Americans do take Canadian things).
There is something essential about highways and roads in the American imagination. There’s a reason I was able to find so many hit songs about cars. (I remember taking a class in undergrad about coming-of-age novels. We read Kerouac's “On the Road.” The class was taught by a Polish woman who emphasized the essential American-ness of “road novels” as a genre. It sticks with me as I think about European stories of travel, which involve trains more often than cars. Trains as the location of the meet-cute. Train stations as the liminal spaces. The symbolism is all different).
“Life is a Highway” appeals to so many because it’s so accessible. More likely than not, you’ve experienced the feeling of driving on America’s endless interstates. If you’re like me, from a mid-American, mid-sized city with barely any public transport, you probably spent nights just driving around with nothing better to do than burn some gas and watch the buildings go by.
In America, life really is a highway. It’s rare you can go anywhere in the country these days without seeing the signs of American infrastructure somewhere off in the distance: a road, a bridge, a highway. Unless you’re in the middle of a forest, on top of a mountain, or in a desert, it’s hard to exist without hearing the familiar swish of cars in the distance. They’ve shaped the American landscape and in doing so, the American idea of movement.
Then there is “Take Me Home (Country Roads)” (1971). I wanted to end on this one because so often when I get riled up about cars, public transport, carbon emissions, and American infrastructure, I forget to talk about my own sweet memories of being on the road.
John Denver’s song is about the beauty of America. In some ways It’s really not about the roads, but about what we see from them — what we can access.
Not long ago, my car broke down outside of Goblin Valley State Park in Utah. It was early morning, and there weren’t many people around. I’d been able to drive to a nice area (really remote, definitely not accessible without four-wheel-drive). I had to figure out what to do, so I started walking out toward some open space where people were car camping. The desert rock was orange all around me as the sun came up. I found some people sleeping in their car, and they drove me to the ranger station to call triple-A.
The story sums up my mixed feelings. In some ways, I’m thankful for my car. That I’ve been able to live in it, to go places I otherwise couldn’t, and to enjoy solitude in those journeys. But then there is the side of car-based individuality that isolates us. When something goes wrong, we’re all alone. You have to rely on the kindness of others.
I guess it’s like hitchhiking in that way. You can put your thumb out and hope for a ride, but you might not get picked up. It’s an adventure, but an unreliable one. At least with trains, the stops are always there, and they’ll always pick you up.
I’ve been thinking about alternative visions of America. Ones in which high-speed rail replaces highways. Where housing is built upward not outward. Where green spaces are integrated into cities. I invite you to try to imagine that too.
I’ll be writing more about cars and oil. If all goes well, the next post should be about the Mad Max franchise. Thanks for sticking with me through this very long post.
A little bit of recommended reading (some of this I haven’t even gotten to yet, so it’s sort of a wishlist for me [hint, hint, if you’re reading this maybe buy me a book!]):
— Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road to Bankrupt and Bailout— and Beyond by Paul Ingrassia
— Car Country: An Environmental History, by Christopher W. Wells
— The Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler
— Street Smart: The Rise of Cities, the Fall of Cars, by Samuel I. Schwartz
— The Future of Public Transport, by Paul Comfort
Finally, if you want to check out my Spotify playlist of car songs you can click here.