SUNDAY, 15 JUNE 2025

The car has been an integral feature of post-war popular music since the arrival of the teenager was announced in Life Magazine in 1944. Whereas in Europe the iconography of the new youth culture tended to centre on the motor bike or the scooter, in the vaster expanses of America the car took centre-stage. It was already an essential part of US life. As early as 1946, there were versions of the song, Route 66, a musical journey through the celebrated highway that linked much of the western half of America, even if they were recorded by the likes of Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby, who were far from being icons of the new youth culture. But soon a host of singers from R&B and rock-and-roll like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and Bo Diddley were writing and singing songs about cars. The mythology of the freedom of the road got a further shot in the arm from the Beat generation in the 1950s with Kerouac’s On The Road, so it didn’t matter if you were alternative or mainstream: if you were young, your life and your culture revolved around cars.

So by the early sixties, the car had become an essential accessory of youth. It both symbolised and enabled teenage freedom, the freedom to escape the strictures of home and the beady eyes of parents, and to forge a unique identity and a distinctive group culture based on date of birth. No song expresses the sense of liberation offered by the car better than The Passenger by Iggy Pop. This song is a sort of anthem to the endless freedom that the automobile seemed to offer in the 1960s. As we listen, we travel alongside someone cruising through urban landscapes at night under a star-studded sky with no destination and no reason for doing this other than to keep on moving (‘and he rides and he rides’). There is a kind of ecstacy to the experience: ‘And everything was made for you and me/Cause it just belongs to you and me’. In Iggy Pop’s song, the car offers more than a liberation from controlling parents; it becomes a source of an existential freedom. But even at a more everyday level, the car provided autonomy: young people with few personal possessions at least had a beaten-up jalopy which gave them the freedom of the open road and a mobility that was thrilling and empowering.

A key feature of The Passenger is its repetitive rhythm, mirroring the experience of riding fast in a car through empty streets. Some blues and country music and even gospel had already tried to capture the rhythm of a train in a song, and pop was finding its rhythm of the automobile. Iggy Pop, for instance, eschews any elaboration that might disrupt his song’s simple chord progressions and its core beat. When the track does move to a higher register of feeling, this is achieved through the vocal work and a sense that the experience grows so euphoric that words collapse into syllables: all we get is ‘la la la la la la la la’. I imagine many listeners would hear this song and find it deeply uninteresting. I am one of those, however, who thinks its simplicity marks a kind of perfection and makes The Passenger one of the best tracks ever to emerge from pop or rock, and I’m far from alone in this: it has a multitude of committed fans. The simplicity of the music reflects the raw experience and that is all that matters: the song is true to the feelings at its roots.

A different kind of simplicity emerges in another band for whom the car was central: the early Beach Boys. In mood and setting, we are far from the heady intoxication and the netherworld night vista of The Passenger: we have left the ‘city’s ripped backsides’ for sunshine and suburbia and the people who ride the car are no longer rebellious hippie-types but wholesome, preppy college boys and girls on their way to the beach. But the promise of the car remains the same: teenage freedom. In Fun Fun Fun, a girl borrows her daddy’s car and promises to go to the library to study but instead she uses it to drive to the hamburger stand and flirt with the boys there. Little Deuce Coupe is a paean to the singer’s car as he boasts about all of her features, especially how fast she can go (and the personal pronouns I’ve used come from the song itself). It’s hard to imagine a song which better and more simply expresses the American love affair with the car.

Except for the harmonies, the early Beach Boys songs are as simple as Iggy Pop’s Passenger; however, while similarly aiming to capture the beat of riding in a car, their rhythm is less insistent, and the tone of the music is lighter and more effervescent. Make no mistake, this simplicity was deliberate. If anyone was capable of making songs which were complex and musically ‘interesting’, it was Brian Wilson, but he chose to keep his early work simple because that was closest to the unalloyed feelings of pleasure that he wanted to express. I know this is something I keep banging on about but complexity doesn’t necessarily guarantee good art. Misplaced virtuosity is not a virtue.

The fact that even a controversial ‘cult’ figure like Iggy Pop turns his song into a kind of homage to the experience of riding in a car, and that a lot of Brian Wilson’s early career was spent championing driving as part of the American way of life, explodes a myth that those of us who enjoy pop and rock often like to believe: that these musical forms are inherently transgressive. In fact, they are frequently suburban and sometimes even conformist, especially when compared to genres such as jazz and blues which had their roots in urban settings or rural poverty and grew out of a troubled background of racial oppression.

So far I’ve focused on American music and its love of the car as an instrument of freedom. When we turn to Europe, the mood tends to change and loses this sense of optimism, freshness and joy. Typical of this was Tell Laura I Love Her, a lachrymose but thoroughly enjoyable soap opera of a ballad by Ricky Valance, which narrates the story of a boy who enters a stock car race in the hope that he will win and be able to afford to buy his beloved a wedding ring, but he dies in a crash during the race. This swerve to fatalistic melodrama was not exclusive to the UK: America also had its tragic tales of doomed teenagers. Jan and Dean, second only to the Beach Boys in surf music with lyrics, had a 1964 hit called Dead Man’s Curve (partly written by Brian Wilson), a cautionary tale which features the story of two young guys in their respective cars taking part in a drag race (similar to the ‘chicken’ scene in Rebel Without a Cause), and one of them goes off the edge at Dead Man’s Curve. However, the person singing the song survives, and the last part makes it clear that he is telling his story to a doctor. So although the chorus states that you ‘won’t come back from Dead Man’s curve’, our hero does. This concession to a happy ending sums up the American approach to the car: the freedom it offers more than makes up for its risks and its multitude of victims.

In Europe’s less spread-out cities, there was (and still is) a lot more public transport, so owning a private car was much less important, and a motorbike or scooter was often a more practical way of getting around town, so the car has been less central to its youth music. It is hard, for example, to imagine a song like the Hollies’ 1966 hit, Bus Stop, ever coming out of the States. At the end of the 1970s and in the early 80s, there were a few songs such as Gary Numan’s Cars and John Foxx’s Burning Car that made the automobile their focus. However, the former doesn’t talk about the freedom his car brings but the potential it gives him to detach himself from other people (‘here in my car, I feel safest of all/I can lock all my doors’), while the latter simply paints a picture of a car on fire following a road accident with none of the human interest of Tell Laura I Love Her or Dead Man’s Curve. Both Numan’s and Foxx’s songs were part of an electronic new wave which was wedded to the idea of human beings as machines and sought to express the isolation and anomie of modern urban life by squeezing all the emotion out of music, a continent away from the beachfront frolics of the Beach Boys.

The roots of much of the work of new wavers like Numan and Foxx lay in Krautrock and specifically the music of Kraftwerk, who in 1974 recorded Autobahn, a track which is the apotheosis of the car song, at least as expressed in Europe. This long piece was a surprise hit in the UK in 1974 and even made the Billboard top 100 in the US. It shared very little musically with the American stuff I have mentioned, although interestingly Hütter, who co-composed the song, talked in an interview about the influence of the Beach Boys, (which I personally find hard to discern except for the emphasis on the tonal quality of the sound), but one feature it did share with its US counterparts was its repetition and surface simplicity. This was Europe, though, so we have left the highways and freeways of California for the German autobahn, and the rhythm and the feel is totally different. Instead of the freedom and exhilaration of driving in the sunshine or under the stars, we have the monotony of an autobahn that stretches endlessly into the distance, music that is synthesiser rather than guitar-based, and the overall sensation as we ride is one of being hypnotised rather than elated.

Kraftwerk made it clear, though, that they intended the song to express the pleasures of driving. They were part of a new Germany that was rising from the ashes of Nazism and a devastating war and they embraced the re-building and re-invention of their country. So if we want to find one of post-war’s few direct attacks on the car, we must turn to the eternal grumpiness of England. This was Warm Leatherette, a single by The Normal which became a staple of the punk rock evenings I used to go to when I was in my twenties. The music was nothing like punk: it was a kind of crude electronica which sounded like the screech of a dentist’s drill as the piece described the scene of a fatal car accident: ‘a tear of petrol is in your eye/the handbrake penetrates your thigh’. It was a one-hit wonder and yet it has been covered many times since, most famously by Grace Jones (in my opinion, disappointingly). Warm Leatherette might possibly be the most musically unsophisticated piece ever to have the accolade of inspiring so many covers, yet this is a testament to its originality and it deserves its cult following. It was certainly unique.

Its roots lie in the novel, Crash, by J.G.Ballard, later made into a film of the same name. It is about a group of fetishists who turn up at car crashes because they find them sexually arousing. It is interesting that Valance and Ballard, who were both British, chose to set their song (Valance) and novel (Ballard) in the US, as if in recognition that this is the natural home of the private car. In doing this, they connected to an American underbelly of people who took a more critical, or at least a less celebratory, view of the car, even if these people were a small, often obscure, minority. The photojournalist, Weegee, for example, made his name by being first to arrive at car crashes and taking gruesome pictures of the scene and selling them to the newspapers. A 1975 movie, Death Race 2000, was set in a world where contestants competed with each other in a car race where they earned points and eventually won first place by killing the most pedestrians. Warhol depicted car crashes as part of his Death and Disaster series. So the American worship of the automobile definitely had its Jungian shadow but you needed to search hard to find it, not only in mainstream music, film and art, but even in the counter-culture.  

However, any disquiet about the car these rare examples might suggest is dwarfed by the number of road movies and pop and rock songs which glorify it, especially in America, and there is still general approval of the role it plays in our lives. There seems little of the ambivalence that exists, for example, about science: the half-buried fears which surface for a moment in the figure of the mad scientist in horror and monster movies or in unsettling, dystopian sci-fi. The car still basically gets a free pass in art that is often very close to the adverts of the car manufacturers, with their images of cars on empty roads in pristine wilderness. Very little art shows it as the cause of millions of deaths worldwide, or as a polluter and destroyer of our cities, or as a reason for the decline in the use of outside public space.

I realise I have barely ruffled the surface of this subject of the car in post-war music and there are hundreds of other songs that I could have included in this short piece: perhaps someone somewhere is already doing a PhD thesis on this. I also recognise that I’ve lumped many kinds of music together into a category I’ve simply called ‘popular’ and that there are problems with doing this (e.g. was Warm Leatherette genuinely popular in the sense of its having a mass audience?). And finally, as someone who would like the see the role of cars in our lives reduced, I acknowledge that I am swimming against the tide when I question our relationship with the private car, and that many would dismiss my concerns and opinions on the subject as ‘woke’. Even if the mood is changing a little, for example in the pedestrianisation of our city centres, at the moment our overall approval of the car seems here to stay. It will be interesting to see if the future of driverless cars changes our thinking by weakening our sense of personal attachment to these chunks of metal and diminishing our enthusiasm for the myth of the open road.

As I sat here working on this essay, the news came through of the death of Brian Wilson. I would like to take this chance to pay tribute to one of the most talented people ever to grace the world of pop.