Essay · Music & Culture
The Glamour of Disconnection
The Cars made music about emotional unavailability and called it pop, which was either a very sophisticated joke or the most honest thing anyone did in the late 1970s, depending on how you felt about the decade. The answer is that it was both, and the combination — the gleaming surfaces, the detached vocals, the hooks that lodged in the skull while the lyrics described people who were constitutionally incapable of connection — produced one of the most formally perfect bodies of work in the history of American rock.
By Bergotte · Boston & New York · Music & Culture
They arrived fully formed. The Cars’ debut album, released in June 1978, sounds not like a first record but like the distillation of something — as though the band had been working toward this sound for years and had simply, at the moment of recording, achieved it completely. The production is extraordinary: dry, precise, each instrument occupying its exact place in the mix with the fastidiousness of someone who has thought very carefully about space and what happens in it. The guitars are clean and sharp. The keyboards — Elliot Easton’s guitar lines weaving around Greg Hawkes’s synthesizers — create a texture that is simultaneously warm and cold, inviting and repelling, the sonic equivalent of a beautiful face with the eyes closed. And over all of it, Ric Ocasek’s voice: flat, affectless, delivering lyrics about desire and obsession and longing in the tone of someone reading a moderately interesting newspaper article, as though the feelings being described belong to someone else and he is merely reporting them.
This was new. Not the elements — the new wave influences, the art rock sophistication, the debt to the Velvet Underground and to Roxy Music and to the British punk that had cleared the air two years earlier — but the combination, the specific way these elements were assembled into a sound that was utterly distinctive and immediately recognisable and that produced, in the listener, the slightly vertiginous experience of being enormously entertained by something that was, if you listened carefully, about the impossibility of entertainment, about the sealed quality of modern emotional life, about people who want things they cannot have and have things they cannot want.
Boston and the Making of Something New
The Cars formed in Boston in 1976, from the remnants of several earlier bands in which Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr had been working through the influences that would eventually produce the debut album. Boston in the mid-1970s was a city with a significant rock scene — Aerosmith had emerged from it, as had a generation of bar bands playing a harder and more straightforward rock than anything the Cars would eventually make — and the Cars were, from the beginning, slightly to one side of the scene that surrounded them: more art-conscious, more influenced by the European sounds that were arriving via import records and music press, more interested in the studio as a compositional tool than in the raw energy of the live performance.
Ocasek was the band’s primary songwriter and its visual and aesthetic architect — a tall, angular man of striking appearance whose personal style was itself a kind of argument, the black clothes and the dark glasses suggesting someone who had thought carefully about image and decided that the most powerful image was one of deliberate opacity. He was not performing accessibility. He was performing its opposite, and the performance was the point: in an era of confessional rock, of the singer-songwriter’s therapeutic self-disclosure, of the assumption that authenticity required openness, Ocasek’s opacity was a provocation and a position.
Benjamin Orr — who took lead vocals on several of the band’s most commercially successful songs, including “Just What I Needed” and “Drive” — brought to the partnership a beauty and a warmth that Ocasek’s aesthetic intelligence required as a counterbalance: where Ocasek’s vocals were cerebral and detached, Orr’s were physical and present, and the interplay between the two sensibilities gave the band a range it would not have had with either alone. Elliot Easton’s guitar playing — technically accomplished, melodically inventive, always finding the note that surprised without destabilising — and Greg Hawkes’s keyboard work, which anticipated the synthesizer-dominated sound of the early 1980s without being consumed by it, completed an ensemble of unusual coherence and unusual intelligence.
The Debut and the Sound That Defined a Moment
The Cars’ self-titled debut produced four singles that received significant radio play, which was unusual for a debut and which reflected both the album’s commercial accessibility and its critical intelligence: these were songs that worked on the radio, that had hooks and drive and the quality of immediate listenability, and that also rewarded repeated attention with a complexity that the immediate surface did not advertise. “Just What I Needed” is the most perfect of them — a song about obsession that sounds like a love song, in which the narrator admits that he doesn’t mind the girl’s lying and cheating because she occupies his mind and occupation is what he needs, which is either romantic or pathological and is presented with sufficient ambiguity to be both.
The production, by Roy Thomas Baker — who had made Queen’s most extravagant records and who brought to the Cars sessions a studio intelligence of considerable sophistication — is the album’s other great achievement. Baker understood what Ocasek was trying to do with the sound and gave it the gloss it required: not the raw, slightly rough quality of punk production, not the warmth of classic rock, but something cleaner and more artificial, a sound that acknowledged its own constructedness, that wore the studio as openly as the songs wore their hooks. The Cars’ debut sounds like a record that knows it is a record, and the self-consciousness is not a defect but a feature.
“I’m not interested in feelings. I’m interested in the structures that feelings produce.” — Ric Ocasek, in interview, 1979
Candy-O, Panorama, and the Art Rock Turn
The second album, Candy-O (1979), extended the debut’s approach with more confidence and slightly more darkness: the songs are longer, the arrangements more adventurous, the emotional terrain somewhat bleaker. “It’s All I Can Do” is the standout — a song of such melodic perfection and such emotional desolation that it represents, perhaps, the fullest single expression of the Cars’ central theme: the person who wants connection and is constitutionally incapable of achieving it, who reaches toward another person and finds, at the moment of contact, that the reaching is all there is.
Panorama (1980) is the album that the Cars’ commercial audience found most difficult and that their critical admirers have tended to find most interesting. It is the darkest and the most formally experimental of the early records, with longer song structures, more dissonant textures, and lyrics that abandon even the nominal gesture toward conventional romance and address, directly and without the comfort of the pop hook, the anxiety and the dislocation of modern American life. “Touch and Go” — the album’s most discussed song — is a piece of art rock of genuine ambition, its stop-start rhythms and its deliberately uncomfortable chord progressions producing a listening experience that refuses the pleasure it keeps promising. It was not a commercial success, and the band responded with Shake It Up (1981), which retreated from the experiment toward the accessibility of the debut with a decisiveness that suggested they understood the limits of their audience’s patience and had decided, on balance, to respect them.
Heartbeat City and the Mainstream Embrace
Heartbeat City (1984) is the album on which the Cars achieved their greatest commercial success and produced the song that, for many listeners, defines them entirely. “Drive” — sung by Benjamin Orr, written by Ocasek, produced with a crystalline simplicity that strips the Cars’ sound to its emotional essence — is a ballad of such melodic beauty and such emotional precision that it represents, in the arc of the band’s career, something close to a masterpiece: the detachment that characterised all the previous work is still present, but it has been warmed, slightly, by something that might be genuine tenderness, a moment in which Ocasek’s aesthetic distance yields to a direct emotional statement that the music has been approaching for six albums without quite achieving.
The song became famous beyond its considerable musical merits when it was used as the soundtrack to the Live Aid concert montage in July 1985 — images of famine in Ethiopia set against Orr’s voice asking who’s going to drive you home — and the combination of the music’s beauty and the images’ horror produced an effect of almost unbearable intensity that neither could have achieved alone. The Cars did not intend this use of their song, and the use did not define the song, but it attached to it a weight of cultural memory that the song has carried ever since and that has made it, for a generation of listeners, inseparable from a specific historical moment.
“Who’s going to drive you home tonight?” — Ric Ocasek, Drive, 1984
The rest of Heartbeat City operates at a slightly lower altitude than “Drive” but maintains the standard of melodic invention and studio craft that the band had established from the beginning. “Magic,” “Hello Again,” “Why Can’t I Have You” — these are songs that justify the word craftsmanship in its fullest sense: made with skill and care and intelligence, designed to do a specific thing and doing it with complete success, products of a band that understood its own capabilities and was working within them with full professional confidence.
New Wave, Art Rock, and Where the Cars Belonged
The question of where the Cars fit in the taxonomy of late 1970s and early 1980s music is one that critics found difficult at the time and that has not been entirely resolved since. They were not punk — too polished, too studio-conscious, too interested in the hook and the production detail. They were not new wave in the British sense — too American, too rooted in the rock tradition, too far from the art school influences that shaped the British bands. They were not pop metal, not classic rock, not AOR in the standard sense. They were, in the end, the Cars, which is a category of one, and the category is defined by the combination of elements that no other band assembled in quite the same way: the art rock intelligence, the pop accessibility, the emotional detachment, the melodic generosity, the studio perfectionism.
The bands they most clearly influenced — in retrospect and by the acknowledgement of the musicians themselves — include a significant portion of the alternative rock that emerged in the mid-1980s and the 1990s: Weezer, whose debut album is unthinkable without the Cars’ combination of melodic directness and emotional awkwardness; Garbage, whose production aesthetic owes a clear debt to the Cars’ studio approach; a generation of indie bands for whom the idea that a pop song could be simultaneously accessible and intelligent, formally perfect and emotionally complex, was demonstrated by the Cars before it was available as a received assumption.
The comparison with Roxy Music — the most obvious British antecedent — is illuminating. Both bands were interested in glamour and in its relationship to emotional unavailability, both used the studio as a compositional tool in ways that the rock tradition had not quite anticipated, both produced music of considerable sophistication within the structures of the pop song. The difference is one of register and of temperature: Roxy Music’s glamour is European, theatrical, aware of its own excess and in love with that excess, while the Cars’ glamour is American, cooler, more ironic, aware of its own excess and slightly uncomfortable with it, which is a more uncomfortable and a more interesting position.
Ocasek and the Intelligence Behind the Surface
Ric Ocasek is one of the more underassessed figures in the history of American rock, and the underassessment is partly a function of the detachment that was his primary public mode. He did not make himself easy to admire in the conventional way — did not perform vulnerability, did not offer access to the interior life, did not provide the narrative of struggle and redemption that the rock mythology requires of its significant figures. He made records, with great care and great intelligence, and the records were the argument he made about himself and about the world, and the argument was complete in itself and did not require supplementation by biography or confession.
As a producer, working with other artists after the Cars disbanded in 1988, he demonstrated that the intelligence behind the Cars’ sound was transferable and was genuinely his: the records he made for Weezer, for Bad Brains, for Suicide, for a dozen other acts across two decades, bear the same qualities of clarity and precision and emotional intelligence that the Cars’ albums had, and they demonstrate that Ocasek understood production not as a set of technical procedures but as a form of argument — a way of saying something about the material that the material alone could not say.
He died in September 2019, at seventy-five, in his New York apartment. Benjamin Orr had died in 2000, of pancreatic cancer, at fifty-three. The band had reconvened briefly in 2011 for Move Like This, their first album in twenty-four years, and the album was received with the warmth that tends to greet returns of this kind — not quite as good as the early work, better than anyone had a right to expect — and it demonstrated that the Cars’ sound was not period-specific, not tied to the particular cultural moment of 1978 in the way that some sounds are tied to their moments, but durable in the way that formal intelligence is always durable: the thing that is made well does not date in the way that the thing made for the moment dates, because it was never primarily about the moment.
What the Cars Were Saying
The Cars’ message — if a band so committed to surface and so suspicious of the confessional could be said to have a message — is contained in the gap between the music’s accessibility and the lyrics’ detachment, between the warmth of the melody and the coldness of the narrator. The gap is the subject. The gap is what all the songs are about: the modern condition of people who have the technology of connection and the aesthetic of connection and the desire for connection and who find, in the moment of attempted connection, that something essential is missing — some capacity for genuine contact that the surfaces of contemporary life have made unavailable or unnecessary or both.
This is not a comfortable subject, and the Cars made it comfortable, which is either a commercial compromise or a formal achievement depending on how you look at it. The argument this essay would make is that it is a formal achievement: that the comfort of the music — the hooks, the production, the beauty of the melodies — is not a softening of the subject but its vehicle, that you feel the disconnection more acutely because the music surrounding it is so warm, that the gap between the sound and the meaning is precisely calibrated to produce the experience the songs are describing.
You are in the song. The song is about you. The song is beautiful. You feel, listening to it, both connected and alone, both present and absent, both found and — in the word that recurs through the Cars’ lyrics with the frequency of an obsession — lost. This is not nothing. It is, in fact, a precise and enduring description of a condition that the decade they emerged from had produced and that the decades since have not resolved, and the music that describes it remains, forty years later, as accurate and as formally perfect as the moment it was made.
This essay draws on the Cars’ studio albums The Cars (1978), Candy-O (1979), Panorama (1980), Shake It Up (1981), Heartbeat City (1984), Door to Door (1987), and Move Like This (2011), and published interviews with Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr across the band’s career. Ric Ocasek was born Richard Theodore Otcasek on March 23, 1944, in Baltimore, Maryland, and died September 15, 2019, in New York City. Benjamin Orr was born Benjamin Orzechowski on September 8, 1947, in Lakewood, Ohio, and died October 3, 2000, in Atlanta, Georgia.
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