Cars. Gary Numan. 1979. Beggars Banquet.

 Highly stylized and toned to mock emotionlessness, Gary Numan’s singing voice is the definitive pop expression of twentieth century alienation. A common complaint held by critics of electronic based pop music when it began to chart in the States was against its supposed “inhumanity,” but what was really at issue was the intended discomfort provoked in those listeners by largely unrecognizable, programmable instruments creating, with artistic  precision, an atmosphere of modern vulnerability and  distrust. That segment of the pop audience decrying the inhuman was only having another facet of its humanity stimulated by what it had never before heard on commercial radio. Texturally, Cars—from Numan’s third record The Pleasure Principle, his first without Tubeway Army—suggests a fantasy of high speed traffic, elegant, and swiftly paced, with a disquieting, erotic undercurrent that satisfyingly retains its synthesizer driven tension throughout. The song is cleverly structured—four verses and an instrumental bridge—to complement the four verse lyric’s one-hundred-eighty degree trajectory. Beginning with the self-isolating assurance of “I feel safest of all” and ending with the crisis mismanagement declarative, “Nothing feels right,” Numan charts our anxieties’ cyclical recurrence with a bridge repeated three times. Today, it isn’t unusual hearing the psychosis of dark incel energy coming from the polished arpeggios of Numan’s late seventies masterpiece. Of the remaining eight singles that shared the Billboard Top Ten with Cars, only Blondie’s Call Me and Bob Seger’s Against the Wind sound unencumbered by the weight of commercial disposability.  Cars shares with the former unmistakably familiar production values that challenged presumptions about a mass audience’s reluctance to embrace ersatz sophistication, and with the latter a reasonable fear of the irremediably consequential. Cars disrupts the quotidian with its fever dream hermeticism. Headlights off, it drives directly into the coming terror.


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