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.

-----

*"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

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Six

More Songs of Science Fiction

The video for "Cars" by Gary Numan (1979) is science-fictional. It has similarities to the video for "I Ran (So Far Away)" by A Flock of Seagulls (1982) (actually it's the other way around), which is also science-fictional and also fearful or paranoid. The Flock of Seagulls video is also shot inside of a enclosed place, like the inside of a spaceship. There are bright lights and mirrors. On the floor is silvery foil like the outside of the Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM. Haunting that space are silent, robot-like women similar to the robot-like men in the video for "Cars." These women look like they could be aliens from Space: 1999 or Doctor Who. Should we call them gynoids rather than androids? 

Other dystopian/futuristic/science-fictional videos:

• "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" by The Alan Parsons Project (1977), in which a faceless robot capable of transporting itself instantaneously through time and space menaces a man in an otherwise deserted futuristic cityscape, one that looks like the city in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972). The song "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" is from the album I Robot, which drew from Isaac Asimov's robot stories. In the video from 1977, it is a robot--a science-fictional creation--that transports itself instantaneously. In The Ring, from 2002, a movie about a video, it is a horror-fictional creature that transports herself that way.

• "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush (1985), a video with an otherwise sad but romantic mood but that includes futuristic and dystopian architecture and imagery, in particular gray faceless masses of people who wear masks over their facelessness. These remind me of later Internet memes showing masses of gray-faced NPCs, which are, ultimately, dystopian because the people they represent--people who repeat mindlessly the things spoon-fed them by their masters--are in pursuit of a perfectly awful future for all of us.

• "We Are All Made of Stars" by Moby (2002), another science-fictional video made for a song that is supposed to be about hope and affirmation. The video is ironic in that these people who are supposedly "made of stars" (like Carl Sagan's "we are star stuff") are all so wretched, debased, corrupt, and depraved. A double irony is that the singer haunts the video, apparently unseen, while wearing a spacesuit. He is hermetically sealed inside, apparently so as to avoid exposure to the taint of these people. Is he an alien observer on earth?

• "Push It" by Garbage (1998), an extraordinary video filled with striking and memorable imagery. Like the video for "Breathe," it is a catalogue of horrors, but also of mysterious and surrealistic figures and events. The singer Shirley Manson looks like a goth girl in the video and has admitted to dark themes and inspirations in her music. In the video for "Push It," there are the Children of the Damned; a cemetery, a Gothic house, and other Gothic, weird, and decadent imagery; a robot man with a lightbulb head; two weird-alien women; a staticky figure who looks as if he exists between two worlds, partly in ours, partly in another, like Captain Kirk trapped in the Tholian web or like an image on a television "tuned to a dead channel." I have included it here as a science-fictional video, but it's also a horror- and weird-fictional video, a synthesis made possible, I suppose, by changes in pop culture from the 1970s to the end of the millennium. At the end of the video, the singer licks a mirror. At the end of the video for "We Are All Made of Stars," Corey Feldman licks a cellphone screen, the black mirror of the contemporary Narcissus.

By the way, the first manned moon landing happened 57 years ago tomorrow, and this summer will be Shirley Manson's birthday, so Happy Birthday to her! There are more mentions of the Apollo missions coming up.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Five

Rocket

The song "Rocket" by the Smashing Pumpkins was released in 1994. The video for "Rocket" is science-fictional. It's like a miniature 1980s movie, like Explorers, from 1985. I'm not sure of the physics of the video, but then "Rocket" is not about the physics of space travel. It's about fun and innocence tinged with irony. It has a twist ending. But if you want to make it about physics, it seems to involve a time dilation, so it's not just about space travel. It's also about time travel. The members of the Smashing Pumpkins are now in their fifties and sixties. We are almost arrived at their future forecast in the video for "Rocket."

"Rocket" is a rocket video. The video for "1979," released in 1996, is a car video. It's like a miniature movie, too, like American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused. But there is melancholy in the video and song, a longing for something lost from childhood and adolescence. The video for "1979" also involves time travel. The singer, who is an adult, shares the backseat of a 1972 Dodge Charger with young people--they must have been his friends in 1979--who don't know he's there. He is a ghost from the future haunting his own past. Only he has aged. They are still frozen in time, like Keats' lovers on a Grecian urn.

So in the video for "Rocket," the children travel into the future in a rocketship to see the singer, while in the video for "1979," the singer travels into the past in an automobile to see and be among children. Seventeen years separated the release of the song "1979" from the year about which the singer sings. He travels backward from the year of "Breathe" to the year of "Cars." He reverses the decay of years and undoes time, but only for four and half minutes.

* * *

In "Rocket," Billy Corgan sings:

I shall be free
I shall be free

But the freedom for which he yearns is from "those voices inside me." His song and his feelings are inward, as in "Cars" by Gary Numan. Neither song is about anything larger than the singer.

The Monkees had a song in which they, too, expressed a desire for freedom. It's called "For Pete's Sake," and it was released in 1967, the year in which Billy Corgan was born. They sang:

(In this generation)
We gotta be free
We gotta be free

Their lyric is "we" rather than "I," and they sing for a whole generation. The generation of which they sing is the Baby Boom generation. Billy Corgan's is Generation X. The Monkees' song is outward, as in "Going Mobile" by The Who. Both songs are about something larger than the singer.

By the way, the Monkees had their own custom car. It was called the Monkeemobile, and it was built up from a 1966 Pontiac GTO base. One of the co-creators of the Pontiac GTO was John DeLorean, whose DMC DeLorean is used for time travel in Back to the Future (1985). In that movie, time travel is accomplished when the car reaches 88 miles per hour. Is that an allusion to the original Oldsmobile Rocket 88? The blurb in the advertisement I posted the other day reads: "Rocket Ahead with Oldsmobile." A parallel might be: "Rocket Back with DeLorean." So there is this question: is an automobile a rocket into the past or future?

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Four

Cars

"Cars" by Gary Numan was released in 1979, but it seems like the first song of the 1980s. It's as if he had gone into the future, discovered what it looked like, and then, after returning to the then-present, wrote a song to capture what he had seen.* "Cars" is science-fictional in that much of its music is played on synthesizers, that is, on musical instruments dependent upon twentieth-century electronic technology. The video for "Cars" is also science-fictional, with its robot-like humans or human-like robots, including the singer, who is dressed in a red leather space cadet suit, the same color as the robot Maximilian in The Black Hole from the end of the year. There is a darkened interior space like the inside of a spaceship, a lighted pyramid like a recharging booth or a force field, and rows of vertical lights as in the vast, curving corridors of the Death Star.

"Cars" is from Gary Numan's debut solo album The Pleasure Principle. On the cover is a photograph of Mr. Numan looking at a small, glowing, red pyramid. (Pyramids must mean something to him.) With its strange and mysterious artifact and its enthralled (or spooked) onlooker, the image reminds me of the pictures from the Led Zeppelin album Presence, from 1976. The Pleasure Principle had been preceded by two albums recorded by the band of which Gary Numan was a member, Tubeway Army. Those albums were Tubeway Army (1978) and Replicas (1979). I have heard the second but not the first. Evidently, both are replete with the themes and imagery of science fiction. (The album cover for Tubeway Army has a groovy and clever 1970s display face like the title logo of Star Wars.) Replicas is said to be a concept album about a dystopian future. Gary Numan and his bandmates were influenced by Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, about whom I have written lately. I point that out not to draw attention to myself but to show that these arrows are still flying through the subjects before us. By the way, one of the members of Tubeway Army, Jess Lidyard, is or was nicknamed Rael. I take that to be a reference to the flying saucer religion Raëlism, founded in 1974.

A dozen years ago, I wrote about "Cars" and the song and video for "Breathe" by The Prodigy, released in 1996. The video for "Cars" is futuristic and science-fictional. The video for "Breathe" on the other hand is decadent and horror-fictional. I asked the question, What happened in those intervening years? My answer was that Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) happened. That was a flippant answer and I don't put very much stock in it, but something did happen in those years during which genre fiction seems to have turned from science fiction and towards horror, fantasy, and weird fiction, as if writers, readers, and fans had lost confidence in the future and looked instead to the past. They stopped liking rocketships and computers and started liking vampires and zombies. Music seems to have followed suit. Or maybe it was the other way around. Or maybe both music and genre fiction descended at the same time, hand in hand. By the way, both Tubeway Army and The Prodigy were punk influenced.

The Prodigy play electronic music. Like Tubeway Army and Gary Numan, they are reliant upon twentieth-century technology for their sound. Nevertheless, their video for "Breathe" is in no way technological, nor futuristic, nor science-fictional. In fact, it's the opposite, a visual/video catalogue of horrors, filled with the imagery of squalor and decay. The video for "Sober" by the American band Tool, released in 1993, is similarly nightmarish. It's actually fascinating, perfect in its weirdness, creepiness, and horror. Made by way of stop-motion animation, it's like the dark flipside of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and those other specials we watched as children. We watched Ray Harryhausen movies when we were kids, too, and I have always thought that stop-motion animation of that type is very creepy, far superior in its effect and appearance to later computer-generated imagery or CGI. If you want to make a monster, make it from something real and physical rather than as a ghost out of a machine.

There were milder Gothic and romantic videos from that time. One I can think of is the video for "Cuts You Up" by Peter Murphy, released in 1990. Formerly of the British goth band Bauhaus, Peter Murphy played a kind of romantic hero in the video for "Cuts You Up." Running through a dark and gloomy forest, he's like Heathcliff, whose compound mononym denotes his wildness and his dark romantic nature. In Wuthering Heights (1847), Heathcliff is described as a "dark-skinned gipsy." That makes me think of the singer in "Going Mobile," who proclaims: "I'm an air-conditioned gypsy." Those two phrases are close enough to make a song rhyme. In popular culture, the gypsy is a free and romantic figure, unbound by convention and missed by both the police and the taxman. Another name for gypsies is Romany. Like the Gothic romance, they come from the dark and distant past.

I asked what happened between 1979 and "Cars," and 1996 and "Breathe." Another question is what happened between 1971 and "Going Mobile," and 1979 and "Cars." Exactly eight years to the month separated those two songs, but they are very different despite their somewhat shared subject matter. Both are science-fictional, but "Going Mobile" is happy, outward, exuberant. "Cars" on the other hand is insecure, fearful, closed in, even paranoid. You can almost see Pete Townshend smile as he sings his song. "Beep beep," he chirps, as if this were a number on Sesame Street. In his video for "Cars," Gary Numan is shifty-eyed and robotic. He seems fearful or suspicious. His face is a blank. There is close to a snarl on his lips. "Going Mobile" is a song of rebellion against authority. It flies in the face of the establishment. "Cars" on the other hand can't be taken as a political song. Its world is small, as small as the inside of a womb-like car where the singer feels "safest of all." I confess I don't know what happened, but there are and always have been outward songs and inward songs.

-----

*Maybe a better candidate for the first song of the '80s is "Are 'Friends' Electric?" released by Tubeway Army in May 1979. It's science-fictional, too, but as far as I know, it lacks a video.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Three

Going Mobile

"Going Mobile" by The Who is a song about driving and the freedom of the road. It's on the album Who's Next, which was released in 1971, fifty-five years ago this summer. "Going Mobile" was originally part of Pete Townshend's Lifehouse project. Lifehouse was to have been not only a rock opera but also a whole, complex, and very ambitious multimedia and audience-participation project. It's fair to say that Lifehouse was visionary. Its goals or end products may very well have been unreachable. I confess that I don't understand very well just what it was supposed to have been. But imagine if it had come about.

The cover of Who's Next is an oblique reference to science fiction, specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Standing alone and without the reference, it has a decadent or post-apocalyptic look to it. The strange sky was added later to give the image, in the words of photographer Ethan Russell, "this otherworldly quality." The band was driving when they saw the monolith. They got out of their car, took the picture, and got back in again to drive away.

Lifehouse was a science-fictional concept, and so "Going Mobile" is, in its origins, a science-fictional song. I have two quotes to help explain Lifehouse. Here is Pete Townshend himself:

The essence of the story-line was a kind a futuristic scene [. . . .] It's a fantasy set at a time when rock 'n' roll didn't exist. The world was completely collapsing and the only experience that anybody ever had was through test tubes. In a way they lived as if they were on television. Everything was programmed. The enemies were people who gave us entertainment intravenously, and the heroes were savages who'd kept rock 'n' roll as a primitive force and had gone to live with it in the woods. The story was about these two sides coming together and having a brief battle.

And here is a quote from Wikipedia. I like this one better. It's clearer to me and more concise:

Lifehouse is set in the near future in a society in which music is banned and most of the population live indoors in government-controlled "experience suits." A rebel, Bobby, broadcasts rock music into the suits, allowing people to remove them and become more enlightened. Some elements accurately describe future technology; for example, The Grid resembles the internet and "grid sleep" resembles virtual reality.

So Pete Townshend invented the Internet. Take that, Al Gore.

I wrote recently about Billy Idol's multimedia project Cyberpunk, from 1993. I wonder if he could have been inspired or influenced in any way by Lifehouse, not in any of its details but in the larger idea that science-fictional or futuristic concepts could be combined with rock music and its technology to create something big and meaningful, even profound, certainly visionary.

Reading descriptions of Lifehouse leads me to think that it's dystopian and about a controlled society. I have another long quote from Wikipedia. Bear with me. This is going somewhere:

Bobby is the creator of Lifehouse. He is a hacker who broadcasts pirate radio signals advertising his concert, where the participants' personal data are taken from them and converted into music, quite literally "finding your song." At the climax of the album, the authorities have surrounded the Lifehouse; then the perfect note rings forth through the combination of everybody's songs, they storm the place to find everybody has disappeared through a sort of musical Rapture, and the people observing the concert through their Lifesuits have vanished as well.

I have been listening to a lot of '80s music and watching '80s videos. Several of these are dystopian and/or science-fictional in their imagery. One in particular made me think of Lifehouse, if I'm thinking about Lifehouse in the right way. The video is for the song "The Politics of Dancing" by the British new wave group Re-Flex. At first glance, the video is an espionage/suspense/thriller type of story, but it's actually about a dystopian society in which a political authority is trying to control musical expression. The mustachioed visage in the video is not that of Big Brother but of his opposite, the face of the resistance. A political authority--the political establishment--is trying to locate him, to stop him from broadcasting music from a pirate station called Re-Flex Radio. That authority is trying to keep young people from enjoying themselves and hearing things of which the establishment disapproves. In short, it's trying to control information. Here are some lyrics:

We got the message

I heard it on the airwaves

The politicians are now DJs

The broadcast was spreading

Station to station

Like an infection across the nation

Compare that to the lyrics of the Who song "Relay," which was added to Lifehouse, for example:

From tree to tree

From you to me

Traveling twice as fast as on any freeway

Every single dream

Wrapped up in the scheme

They all get carried on the relay

I'm not sure that the lyrics of "The Politics of Dancing" quite match the action in the video, but the video carries its own weight. As in Lifehouse, there is an underground leader who is trying to get the message out about music, dancing, and fun. He's a subversive, doing something forbidden by the establishment, broadcasting from an illegal radio station. At the end of the video, as in Lifehouse (as described above), the authority arrives at the station only to find the studio empty. The musicians have vanished.

"The Politics of Dancing" was released in 1983, perhaps in anticipation of 1984. I can't say whether Re-Flex was influenced by The Who and Lifehouse, but they didn't have to be. Political authorities try to control information. They want to silence differing opinions, disagreement, and dissent. They characterize opposing words and ideas as disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. They are in the business of trying to control people's lives. One way to begin is to control what people say and can think. O'Brien in 1984 understands that. Rock musicians and songwriters know it intuitively, and they might even have personal experience with it. Of course they will write songs of protest and resistance. Rock music by its very nature is anti-establishment. When the police turn off your amplifier, you do what George Harrison did in his rooftop venue and turn it back on again.

Whether Pete Townshend intended it or not, "Going Mobile" is an anti-establishment song, especially now, fifty-five years later. He wrote:

I don't care about pollution

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy

That's my solution

Watch the police and the taxman miss me

I'm mobile.

Those are the words of a free man, or a man aspiring to be free. The establishment is against him, most especially the establishment of today:

• The free man sings, "I don't care about pollution." (This was before carbon dioxide--a naturally occurring chemical compound generated by nearly every living thing and essential for life on earth--was classed as a pollutant.) The current establishment is "green," carbon-neutral, and pressing for zero emissions by which the people will be controlled, thereby impoverished and immiserated. Or maybe it's the other way around.

• He is air-conditioned. They believe on the other hand that air-conditioning is "a scourge," as Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire recently said. Evidently it's not a scourge for the high-ranking people in the European Commission, including Frau von der Leyen, for during the recent heat wave, they got to keep theirs while the Ugnaughts and Troglytes who labored away in the floors below them did not. And here we thought Europe is a democracy. The current controversy has gone so far that Wikipedia now has a page called "The Politics of Air Conditioning." I can't wait for the song.

• The free and mobile man avoids the police. In the United Kingdom at least, the police are an instrument of the establishment. It and the people who support it love the police. There the police will come knocking on your door if you write or say something the establishment doesn't like. That's how they get you to shut up. You can't make your escape the way the musicians do in the video for "The Politics of Dancing." You can't disappear among your own culture and society. You don't have that freedom.

• The free and mobile man avoids the taxman. The establishment on the other hand embraces him, for he's one of their agents of punishment and control. They'll even go so far as to say that paying taxes is patriotic, as our previous president, John Gill, did in 2008. What a bizarre inversion. What a non sequitur. I'm not going to go looking for the first protest song in rock music. "Taxman" by the Beatles (1966) is far enough. In case you haven't heard it, the Fab Four--specifically the songwriter George Harrison--were obviously not in favor. By excessive taxation, the people will also be impoverished and immiserated, and they will be controlled. Beyond that, their tax money will be doled out to people who want to stab and rape them. Another form of punishment, another means of control.

• Finally, the free man is mobile. Beep beep! They want him to stay put. They hate and fear the freedom that allows a man to go mobile, and they understand that mobility is an exercise in what is to them an intolerable personal freedom. The man driving down the highway is pursuing his own happiness. They can't have that. They want his mobility and thereby his freedom to be restricted. They want him to depend on them for his meager portion of happiness. For example, several American states are either already at it or are looking into ways to tax people on the number of miles they drive. There is also talk of installing a kill switch in new cars. In the United Kingdom, there is a controversy about "15-minute cities." Those in the establishment call it a right-wing conspiracy theory that one of the purposes of building 15-minute cities is to limit mobility. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but when someone in the establishment starts talking about "right-wing conspiracy theories," we should start paying attention. They could be letting us know what they want to do, or what they have already done.

There was also of course the big push to force people into electric cars. That push is also about control and about limiting mobility and thereby freedom. There is an old propaganda poster, "When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!" I would paraphrase that to read that when you ride in an electric car, you ride with the enemy of your own freedom. That's not as catchy, but it obtains. In "Joy Connection," I showed an advertisement, including a picture of an automobile, in which the point was made that there are two choices, the first being this: "You can let a government decree what you shall do, what you shall buy, and how much you shall pay." That was the story with electric cars under President John Gill's administration and under other political authorities, present and recently past. Thankfully, all of that seems to be coming to an end, in the United States at least, with no longer the coercion and the big push and very rapid declines in the sales of electric cars. Talk about a scourge. Not the cars so much as the politics behind them.

I know I went pretty far in all of that. The most recent commenter on this blog will probably get on me about being insane or unhinged or silly or childish. I think he's trying to get me to shut up. In contrast, I'm not trying to get him to shut up. It's better when people disagree with and debate each other. It forces everyone to think about where he or she stands and to refine his or her ideas. Trees, bones, muscles, and ideas are made stronger by resistance.

Anyway, my points are these:

First, "Going Mobile" the song and going mobile the activity are about freedom. The establishment doesn't like freedom. They want control. In the 1960s and '70s, when they were not in control, liberals, leftists, and progressives were anti-establishment and pro-freedom. Now that they are in control, they are the opposite. What changed? Well, Pete Townshend provided an answer to that in the last words sung on Who's Next: "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss." Nothing actually changed. The establishment always (or almost always) seeks control. They are anti-freedom. The current establishment are no exception. They who grew up in the 1960s through the 1980s but are now in control have no claim to the music and songs of freedom. For them to go to concerts and wear rock-and-roll t-shirts and act like fans now is a kind of cultural appropriation. Those things are ours, regardless of our youth or age. They should cut it out.

Second, as part of Lifehouse, "Going Mobile" is science-fictional. That leads me back to the idea that started me on this whole series, which is that the car story (or song) is or may be a kind of low science fiction.

Still to come: More science-fictional songs, a few Gothic or horror or weird-fictional songs, and then the long road back to the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. Did you think I was done with that yet?

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Two

Rocket 88

I don't have a very good title for this new series, but when you're going to throw in everything but the kitchen sink, you've got to settle on something. I'll begin with Rocket 88.

After World War II, weird fiction faded and science fiction and the whole culture around it began to take off. Monsters were no longer the supernatural monsters of moors and marches, nor were ghosts the haunters of castles and abbeys. Instead, the ghosts and monsters of the post-war world were those of science and technology. We encountered them in places opened up by war as well as by exploration along the frontiers of science and technology. In The Thing from Another World (1951), that frontier is in the Arctic. In It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Them! (1954), the frontier is the American West, a place dotted with World War II-era military installations, the place where atomic bombs, rockets, missiles, and jet aircraft were developed and tested. These weren't the dark, decaying, gloomy, closed-in places of weird fiction and the Gothic romance. Instead they were bright, sunny, shiny, open, futuristic.

In 1949, Oldsmobile introduced its 88 model, nicknamed Rocket 88 for its Rocket V8 engine. The Oldsmobile Rocket 88 was a popular car, so popular and recognizable in its name that it inspired a song, "Rocket 88," released in 1951, sung by Jackie Brenston, and backed by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm. Like the car, the song was a hit. There were car songs before it, but this was a big one. Some people call it the first rock 'n' roll record. It's nice to think that rock 'n' roll started with a car song.

In its advertising, Oldsmobile tied its Rocket 88 to its namesake technology. For example:

Thirty-four years later, artist Dave Stevens created the following cover for Planet Comics in its issue of July 1984:

The print of this illustration is entitled "Rocket 88" after the emblem on the fuselage. Notice that the riders in each of these two pictures are two in number and in roughly the same posture and position. I wouldn't call this a swipe. Instead, it looks like the first picture inspired the second, or call it a variation or an homage. Notice that the blonde pilot in the second picture is wearing a Nazi-like hat like a British New Wave singer or musician of the same period. (As I write, New Order has come on the radio. I was thinking of Modern English, but my psychic powers aren't strong enough to make that happen.) This comic book was published in the same year as Neuromancer by William Gibson. Don't you wish we had 1980s culture back? 

By the way, Planet Comics was a revival of a comic book title in print from 1940 to 1953. The original Planet Comics was the first science fiction comic book and a spinoff of the science fiction pulp magazine Planet Stories. Ray Bradbury and Leigh Bracket were among the authors published in Planet Stories.

Here is a poster design for Rocket 88, a local band in Wisconsin from 1972 to the 1990s or after. Notice the influence of artist Jack Davis, also of underground comics:

I'm afraid I don't know the name of the artist.

Americans have tested not only rockets, missiles, and jet airplanes in the Desert West. We have also tested automobiles. In 1953, General Motors opened its new automobile proving grounds just outside of Mesa, Arizona. Those proving grounds are no longer in operation. In their place are maze-like subdivisions with science-, space-, and technology-related names: Neutron Point, Wavelength Park, Lunar Green Park. If you have ever watched American car commercials, you are familiar with all of the scenes shot in the Desert West. Automobiles go with the West like a-bombs at Trinity, the Bell XS-1 at Muroc Army Air Field, V-2 rockets at White Sands Proving Grounds, and giant ants in the tunnels under Los Angeles.*

Automobiles and rockets were tested on the salt flats and dry lake beds of the American West. In the 1950s, cars were made to look like rockets with their chrome trim and nosecones and trailing fins. I remember our neighbor, Mr. Sherman, who had a giant 1950s light blue Cadillac. (I think it was an El Dorado Seville, circa 1956.) One time he forgot to put it into park. After he went in the house, his car rolled down the driveway and with a crash speared a parked car at the bottom with its short, heavy fins. Mr. Sherman came out of the house and drove his car back up the driveway. He went back inside, and that seemed to be the end of it. His car was untouched. No such luck for the 1970s car on the receiving end of the crash. Anyway, from the 1950s to the 1970s, cars were named after spacecraft and celestial bodies: Ford Galaxie 500, Mercury Comet, Oldsmobile Rocket 88, Oldsmobile Starfire, Plymouth Satellite, Pontiac Star Chief, Studebaker Starlight, and from the advertisement in the previous entry, Chevrolet Nova and Chevrolet Vega. The Saturn line came along about a decade later. The point is that there were clear connections made between cars and rockets, and between cars and outer space. There were also connections between these things and other aspects of popular culture, including music, comic books, and science fiction. For example, in July 1979, the B-52s issued a single called "Planet Claire," which begins with these lyrics:

She came from Planet Claire
I knew she came from there
She drove a Plymouth Satellite
Oh, faster than the speed of light . . . .

So here is a science-fictional rock song played by a band named after a superfast jet airplane from the 1950s--with eight engines no less--in which the subject drives a Plymouth Satellite. The only thing missing in all of this is a comic book. But there will be another one of those in almost no time at all.

Hold onto the idea of the science-fictional automobile.

(As an aside, the U.S. Air Force rolled out the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in March 1954. It was preceded by the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, which had its first flight on July 8, 1947, the same day that the U.S. Army announced that it had recovered the remains of a flying disc near Roswell, New Mexico. The Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, named for one kind of airplane or another, made its debut in the same year as the B-52 Stratofortress, 1954.)

From 1960 to 1979-1980, the Oldsmobile emblem was a rocket blasting out of a cartouche. Maybe you remember it:

I wanted a simpler graphic representation. You will see why in 10, 9, 8, 7 . . .

If you're a fan of 1950s science fiction, maybe you'll recognize the rocketship emblem:

This one was on the spine of the Winston Science Fiction series of juvenile novels published from 1952 to 1960. That series was graced by the artwork of former comic book artist Alex Schomburg and included the images of many, many rocketships.

Here's another rocketship blasting off into space:

Weird still had some cachet in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Sometimes it was paired with superheroes (Captain America's Weird Tales, 1949-1950), more often with science fiction and fantasy as in EC Comics' Weird Science (1950-1953), Weird Fantasy (1950-1953), and Weird Science-Fantasy (1954-1955). Above is the cover of Weird Science-Fantasy #24, published in June 1954, with cover art by Al Feldstein. The rocket design in the left margin was a standard feature of that title. By the way, Jack Davis, mentioned above, also worked on EC Comics. By the way again, Weird Tales magazine came to an end in September 1954, just two months after this comic book was published. Science fiction magazines lived on.

The first time I ever heard the word modockin, I was a student at a flatland high school in Indiana. A friend named Greg used it a lot. I knew what it meant by the context. It means to drive really fast or for a car to run really fast. I thought I knew its origin. For years I thought it was in reference to a place in California where jet airplanes and maybe rocket sleds were tested. But that was Muroc, not Modoc. Muroc is where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in October 1947, a month after the U.S. Air Force was created and the same year in which the first flying saucers were sighted. You could say that in his flight he was really modockin.

If you look on the Internet, you will see that the word modockin is supposed to be from Modoc Brothers Trucking, which supposedly operated in Indiana and Illinois back in the old days, whenever that was. I haven't found any mention of the modockin Modoc Brothers in old newspaper accounts. I did find, though, that there was a racehorse called Modockin in the 1960s. Before that, there was a song, "Modockin" by the Silver Jets, recorded in 1962 in Frankfort, Indiana, and released by Parr Records. (I think it was actually a rock instrumental.) The Silver Jets were a local band in Frankfort. In 1962, they shared a bill with Roy Orbison at Shady Acres auditorium outside of Mulberry, Indiana. Mulberry, by the way, was the birthplace of brothers Vesto M. Slipher (1875-1969) and Earl C. Slipher (1883-1964), both of whom were astronomers. They didn't do any modockin themselves as far as I know, but they studied celestial objects that have a lot of get up and go. These two non-modockin brothers have a crater of the moon and an asteroid named after them. Anyway, the word modockin has its Indiana connection, maybe in fact has its origins in the Hoosier State. I also found that there is a school in Modoc, Indiana, called Union Junior/Senior High School. Guess what the name of their school mascot is. Believe it or not, it's the Rockets!

Watch them blast off!

*The non-science fiction equivalent of Them! might be He Walked by Night (1948), in which a man who may be a sociopath is finally tracked down in the tunnels under Los Angeles. The sociopath or psychopath--recognizable, describable, diagnosable by science--can be interpreted as a monster of science and suitable for the post-weird fiction twentieth century.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 by Terence E. Hanley