Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Seven

Car Names & Brandnames

There are lots of songs about cars, driving, and being on the road. Here are just a few:

• "Be Thankful for What You've Got" by William DeVaughn (1974):

Though you may not drive a great big Cadillac

Gangsta whitewalls

TV antennas in the back

[. . .]

Diamond in the back, sunroof top

Diggin' the scene with a gangsta lean

The "diamond in the back" refers to the 1970s-era Cadillac Coupe DeVille, which had a diamond-shaped rear window.

• "Hot Rod Lincoln" covered by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (1971):

My pappy said, "Son, you're gonna' drive me to drinkin'

If you don't stop drivin' that Hot Rod Lincoln."

Have you heard this story of the Hot Rod race

When Fords and Lincolns was settin' the pace

That story is true, I'm here to say

I was drivin' that Model A

It's got a Lincoln motor and it's really souped up

That Model A body makes it look like a pup

It's got eight cylinders; uses them all

It's got overdrive, just won't stall

With a 4-barrel carb and a dual exhaust

With 4.11 gears you can really get lost

It's got safety tubes, but I ain't scared

The brakes are good, tires fair

The name of the band is science-fictional, but I think it has more to do with the nostalgia for the 1930s and '40s that was prevalent in the 1960s and '70s than it does with science fiction. Even so, the singer includes a lot of hard detail on his Model A with the Lincoln motor. That was common in midcentury car culture, for example in the letters column of CARtoons magazine (1959-1991). But it is and was also common in the hard science fiction and military science fiction of the 1920s until--when? Now? For an example of hard details about machinery, spacecraft, etc., see Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (1959), such as in Chapter VII in which the narrator describes his battle suit and how it works. Here's a briefer example:

It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.

From Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984).

That attention to detail when it comes to machinery wasn't new in American literature in 1984, or 1959, or 1926 when Amazing Stories made its debut under the editorship of electronics gadgeteer Hugo Gernsback. Here is an excerpt from "To a Locomotive in Winter" by Walt Whitman, from 1876:

 Thee for my recitative,

            Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,

            Thee in thy panoply, thy measur'd dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,

            Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,

            Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,

            Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,

            Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front [. . .].

If you sense sexual overtones in Whitman's poem, you might be onto something. Here is a poem by another American in which you will likely have the same sense:

she being Brand

by e.e. cummings (1926)

 

she being Brand

-new;and you

know consequently a

little stiff i was

careful of her and(having

thoroughly oiled the universal

joint tested my gas felt of

her radiator made sure her springs were O.

K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her

up,slipped the

clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she

kicked what

the hell)next

minute i was back in neutral tried and

again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg.  ing(my

lev-er Right-

oh and her gears being in

A 1 shape passed

from low through

second-in-to-high like

greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity

avenue i touched the accelerator and give

her the juice,good

      (it

was the first ride and believe i we was

happy to see how nice she acted right up to

the last minute coming back down by the Public

Gardens i slammed on

the

internalexpanding

&

externalcontracting

brakes Bothatonce and

brought allofher tremB

-ling

to a  dead.

stand-

;Still)

There is barely disguised sex-in-the-machine in rock and pop music, too:

• "Pink Cadillac" by Bruce Springsteen (1984):

I love you for your pink Cadillac, crushed velvet seats

Riding in the back, oozing down the street

Waving to the girls, feeling out of sight

Spending all my money on a Saturday night

Honey, I just wonder what you do there in the back

Of your pink Cadillac, pink Cadillac

• "Freeway of Love" by Aretha Franklin (1985):

We got some places to see

I brought all the maps with me

So jump in, it ain't no sin

Take a ride in my machine

[. . .]

We going riding on the freeway of love

In my pink Cadillac

(If cars, futuristic machinery, rockets, and spacecraft are symbolic of sex, then maybe the term hard science fiction has an unintentional double meaning.)

Will Rogers famously said that in Depression-era America, "We'll have the distinction of being the only nation to go to the poor house in an automobile." Americans go other places in automobiles, for example, to the:

• "Love Shack" by the B-52s (1989):

Hop in my Chrysler, it's as big as a whale, and it's about to set sail

I got me a car, it seats about 20

So come on and bring your jukebox money

Two more examples of where we go in our cars: First, in 1971 and 1972, Americans loaded automobiles onto rocketships, took them to the moon, and there they went modockin, in relative terms (or maybe I should say they went moondockin) among craters and rocks and over moon dust. Second, in 2018, Elon Musk launched a red Tesla Roadster into outer space, and so an earthly automobile became an outer space-craft. It's still out there, circling through the solar system with a dummy driver called Starman. You can follow his flight on the Internet. If that's not a science-fictional development made manifest in the real world, I don't know what is.

There have been lots of TV shows with custom cars: Batman, The Green Hornet, The Monkees, The Banana Splits, The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky & Hutch, Knight Rider. At least a couple of those cars are science-fictional. There have also been TV shows with cars that aren't custom but nonetheless are identified with a certain character, for example, Columbo and his battered Peugeot 403, Jim Rockford and his teeny Pontiac Firebird Esprit, and Thomas Magnum and his borrowed Ferrari. In popular science fiction and outer space fantasy, spaceships are distinctive, like makes and models of cars, for example in Star Wars or Thunderbirds. A lot of those cars and spaceships have been made into die-cast toys--Hot Wheels, Tootsie Toys, Matchbox, Galoob. They have also been made into plastic models. This was Baby Boomer culture: everything became a toy, a game, a model, a bubblegum card (e.g., Weird Wheels), a comic book, a Halloween costume, or a piece of candy. I confess I can't think of a car-themed candy from the years when Baby Boomers were still young.

Cadillac . . . Ford . . . Lincoln . . . Chrysler . . . all of these are brandnames, and each appears in in at least one of the songs listed above. I'm sure you can come up with plenty more on your own. I have been railing against product placement and the use of brandnames in fiction. Last year, I wrote:

Another problem with the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales is that it is shamelessly, perhaps thoughtlessly, commercial. Its authors place the names of commercial products in their stories as if they had been paid to do so. In contrast, there is only one brandname in Heart of Darkness [by Joseph Conrad], Martini-Henry, the name of a rifle. That's a concrete detail. It's not product placement. In general, I think using the names of weapons, cars, cigarettes, and alcoholic drinks is probably okay in a work of fiction. The list of acceptable brandnames used after that must be, I think, pretty short, especially in a short story.

Using the name of a car in a story or song is not product placement, though, for the name of the car tells us something we need to know. The B-52s sang about a Chrysler "as big as a whale," and we can picture that because we know something about cars. If you're going to the Love Shack, you'd better drive a car that seats a lot of people. I knew someone in the air force who had a car so big and loose in its handling that it was called "the Tuna Boat." (I don't remember the make or model. Maybe it was an Oldsmobile.) When we were kids, our neighbors down the street had a huge car--an Oldsmobile Delta 88--light blue, all steel, with a hood the size of a barn door. Half the kids in the neighborhood could sit on that hood without its buckling. In the summer it got so hot it would scorch the back of your legs. You could have fried an egg on it. On the other end of the street was a light green AMC Gremlin, a completely opposite kind of car, named for a folkloric creature that bedevils aircraft. One of our grade school teachers, a small, intense woman with tall hair, drove a metallic blue Corvair. It was the perfect car for her. Every morning she would tear into the parking lot, late as always and unaware, I guess, that the Corvair was supposed to be "unsafe at any speed." Each of those cars had its own look and feel. It wasn't just "a car." If the detail counts in your story, you go with the detail. By the way, the Delta 88 was named after a jet airplane, the F-102 Delta Dagger, and so there are further connections between automobiles and futuristic technology. But let's move on down the road . . . a Cadillac is a car, but the name also has a certain cachet. If you were alive in the 1970s, you probably remember seeing big Cadillacs cruising up and down the streets of the city. William DeVaughn's details are perfectly evocative of not simply the car but also a time, a culture, a milieu. All are gone forever, but at least we have his song and the memories that will die only when we do.

The make or model of a car is informative, like writing "sycamore" or "oak" instead of "tree." As I wrote before, using the brandnames of weapons, cars, tobacco products, and alcoholic drinks is, I think, acceptable because that use is not about commerce or consumerism but about the story and its characters. We don't need to know specifications and details about most other products. There's a difference between a Lincoln and a Volkswagen. That difference is or can be meaningful in a story. Likewise with a Camel versus a Virginia Slim. The cover illustration of Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (1980) looks like a pack of Camel cigarettes. That's not product placement. The package design is part of the story. One of my greatest friends ever smoked Virginia Slims. They fit her as if they had been designed for her. When Steve McQueen drove a Ford Mustang in Bullitt (1968), that wasn't product placement (although I'm sure it helped sales). The car fit with the character and with the actor, even if the Dodge Charger he chased all around San Francisco outperformed his Mustang.

In movies of the 1980s and '90s, there was a lot of product placement. For example, in Raising Arizona (1987), the Snoats brothers sit down to eat, and there in front of them--between us and them, practically in our faces--are a can of Coke and a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, with a picture of M&Ms on the back of the box to boot. Evelle Snoats doesn't say, "Awful good Kellogg's Corn Flakes®, Mrs. McDonough" because he doesn't have to. It's right there in front of us. That's an advantage that film has over prose: the storyteller's product placement can happen right along with the story. It's still obvious and it still detracts from the storytelling, but at least it doesn't become the storyteller's point. Put another way, film is like a syrinx, for in film the artist can sing two notes at once. Another difference between film and prose: product placement in film is explicitly self-conscious, purposeful, and commercial. The people making the movie or TV show get paid for their services. Authors who use brandnames and place products in their prose presumably do not. Their use of brandnames and their product placement are presumably unselfconscious. They give away their services, for they are so steeped in commercialism and consumerism that this is just how they think. You use brandnames in your writing and speech. It's just what you do. These things add nothing to the story. In fact they detracts from it. And yet authors of today continue to detract from their writing by including brandnames and placing commercial/consumer products, and now services, in their stories.

In our weird fiction book club for June (2026), we read new or newer stories in Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow universe. (He didn't create that universe. Writers after him did, mainly to capitalize on his creation.) One of the stories we read is "Movie Night at Phil's" by Don Webb.* Born in 1960, Mr. Webb is a Baby Boomer, in other words, one of the TV-watching generation. His story is about watching TV. Fun fun. Writers are instructed to write from their own experience, but what if the only "experience" you have ever had is watching TV? This story is one result. If I were to keep reading newer fiction, I'm sure I would find more. What a dreary prospect that is.

I have to tell you, "Movie Night at Phil's" is an extremely annoying story. In the first sentence is a brandname, BetaMax. Although Mr. Webb's story depends on that specific commercial product, his use of a brandname in the first paragraph is jarring and immediately off-putting. Why not write a story that is not dependent upon a branded product? Wouldn't that be a better exercise? Anyway, in the second paragraph is another brandname, Loreal®, complete with the registered trademark symbol. Then another, Frisbee, then Amazon, then eBay, then Sharpie® and its registered trademark symbol. Imagine: a professional writer actually included the registered trademark symbol in his story, not once but twice, the reason being, I guess, that he can't think of a physical object or a commercial service without attaching a brandname to it. If this were a pulp fiction story, would those symbols have counted as words? Would the author have been paid a penny or two for including them? I'm sure the manufacturers of 2012 appreciated his support. Maybe they sent him a check for helping him advertise their products. Writers tend to hawk their own wares, but why would they devote any space at all to hawking anybody else's?

Anyway again, in Mr. Webb's story, even place names and the names of universities are treated as brandnames. These are among his literary offenses that include namedropping, listing, and self-referential and too cute insider information. Maybe Mr. Webb was trying to be satirical. But if your satire is indistinguishable from the things you're attempting to satirize, then something could be wrong with your writing. I suspect he was not attempting satire in his story. I suspect there wasn't any irony at all and that he was writing in weak and pale earnest the way writers do these days because they don't know any other way to write. They have thousands of years worth of literature to which they can turn for guidance, example, edification, and inspiration, and still they write as if they have never read anything at all. It's as if the only storytelling they have ever seen is on the small screen, as if the only cultural past to which they turn is their own childhoods during which they watched nine billion TV shows and commercials, as if the only thing they have ever read--or watched--is a pop culture that was based on a previous pop culture that was based on a previous pop culture . . . in a continuous stepping down from some increasingly remote original of some increasingly remote quality.

I'll take "I got me a car, it seats about 20," or even this:

Da-ga-da-beep-a-con-ja-choo-chon, honk, honk, honk

A-don-ta, ee-cha-koo-na-nee-cha

Bop-a-loo-la-ree-chow

Bomp-a-kee-cho, ee-sonk-konk

(from a driving song) over the contemporary dreck we have in prose form. No more TV-style or TV-influenced writing. No more pitches made in prose form for a new TV show. No more brandnames, no more product placement, no more commercial messages, no more displays of consumeristic knowing and prowess, and definitely no more registered trademark symbols. Please, let's just have good writing.

Be warned: I will soon be writing about more dreck.

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*"Movie Night at Phil's" was originally in A Season in Carcosa, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., and published in 2012. 

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley