Gary Numan: Cars on Multiple Earths
Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I was a young teen the first time I heard Gary Numan’s hit song “Cars.” The best friend of my penpal/zinester friend had made her a beautifully constructed mix tape of 80’s New Wave. She loved it so much she sent a copy of it to me. The mix was my gateway to appreciating synth-led music. I’d previously found synths corny because I associated them with the overplayed, overproduced pop music I’d thoroughly rejected as a solidly counter-culture teen. But Gary Numan was different.
It was the mid-90’s and yet this 80’s New Wave music still sounded like science fiction. What I could not have known at the time, was that while Gary Numan may have been singing to me from the past, he was predicting my future.
I can lock all my doors
It’s the only way to live in cars
Hearing the song as a teen the idea of people locked away in their solitary cars felt completely pitiful and bizarre to me. I didn’t have a driver’s license. I never got one. I grew up in the DC suburbs but we lived along mass transit lines. I’d grab my walkman and walk, or take the bus, or Metro (or get a lift from a friend). I felt like I was part of the physical world around me.
A lot of drivers describe their car as their fortress. Numan, speaking of the road rage incident that inspired Cars, said “I began to think of the car as a tank for civilians”. Yet statistically speaking, cars have been one of the more dangerous modes of transportation for pedestrians and drivers alike.
Here in my car
where the image breaks down
Numan’s protagonist wasn’t wrong. He was just ahead of his time. A highly contagious airborne virus has changed the safety equation. The risks of riding in a car and the alienation it creates are the same as ever but being in a bus or train full of unmasked people is an easy way to catch COVID. So now instead of riding mass transit with others I’m in a private car. Numan’s sci-fi dystopia has come to pass for me.
Did it have to be this way? Like much of Numan’s repertoire, “Cars” is a work of speculative fiction. So let’s speculate on some parallel worlds. DC Comics gives us a naming convention for parallel worlds, Earth 1 and Earth 2. Here we can explore the different possibilities of how music is spread and how a novel airborne disease is communicated.
On our Earth (let’s call it Earth 1) Gary Numan’s punk band Tubeway Army was recording in Cambridge England at Gooseberry Studios. On Earth 1 a band whose name was lost to history accidentally left a minimoog synthesizer behind in that studio. As soon as young Gary got his hands on this technological device he was fully committed to making synth-led music. His label expected a more traditional punk album, but by 1979 Tubeway Army released their groundbreaking second album Replicas, which birthed the sound that would make Gary Numan famous.
Like any superhero, Gary Anthony James Webb renamed himself after discovering his musical powers. He called himself Gary Numan. New Man. The man of the future. This man of the future’s music was era-defining and so compelling that teens like me who were barely alive when it was recorded were trading it on magnetic cassette tapes to listen to on the train 15 years later.
In some parallel earth (let’s call it Earth 2) Gary Numan’s punk band Tubeway Army recorded their debut album in a studio in London. They don’t find an errant synth in the studio. They go on to record some good songs: you can hear one of their more straight-ahead punk songs here:
It’s good punk rock but it certainly is not groundbreaking like “Cars,” which should be the rightful winner of this March Fadness bracket.
Here on Earth 1 Numan decided to try his hand at bass. He’d never played bass before but he bought one and brought it straight to the studio. The first notes he played on the first bass guitar he ever held, was the riff that formed “Cars.”
Our Gary Numan says “Without a doubt, those were the most productive eight minutes of my entire life”. The result was his only mainstream US hit.
On Earth 2 Gary Numan stuck to playing the guitar. Earth 2 Gary Numan probably wore brighter colors and possibly eschewed that platinum blond moment that our Gary had. Maybe he played guitar solos. Statistically, he was probably not going to write a watershed breakout single.
Music historian Andrew Hickey always says “there’s never a first anything” in music but “Cars” was pivotal in popularizing the use of synth as a leading instrument in pop music. Before, synths were either a novelty instrument as in Runaway by Del Shanon, or if they were more central it was in avant-garde music like Kraftwerk or side 2 of Bowie’s Low, or mixed somewhere in a Pink Floyd trance. In Gary Numan’s music the synth is the star of the show and the show is general admission.
Cars was the birth of synth pop. If you love Depeche Mode, Erasure, Nine Inch Nails, CHVRCHES — thank Gary Numan.
“Cars” is extremely catchy. You can hum it. And you can dance to it. Of course it became a hit. But it’s also extremely weird. It doesn’t follow a standard pop song structure. There’s a synth and tambourine solo where the guitar solo would be. The outro is lengthy. The protagonist is not a cool or aspirational figure. He is an outsider inside of a car.
As a young teen a psychologist told Numan he suspected he had “Aspergers” as they called his form of Autism at the time. For many years now Numan has spoken frequently about being autistic, its impact on his art and his experience of being in therapy as a child. Cars is a song by an outsider for outsiders.
During an era of social distancing the synth becomes the perfect instrument: it’s a band you can be in all by yourself.
The only instruments in Cars are synth, distorted bass and percussion–which includes that rattling tambourine — like a ball bearing broke loose in a factory. The synth makes a wobble like sheet metal pounded thin. The riff takes that quavering sliver of metal, clones it, stamps it into shape and shuffles each copy away in a metal filing cabinet.
Numan’s nasal monotone vocals are double tracked. It makes the thin sound fat. A single, unique singing voice becomes an army of Numanoid clones. And there would be clones….
Here in my car
I can only receive
I can listen to you
Calling Numan a “one hit wonder” because he only had one single reach the US Hot 100 Singles Chart makes as much sense as calling Lou Reed a “one hit wonder”. Lou holds the same chart statistic as Numan. No one doubts Reed’s influence.
But there is a conversation to be had around how influential “Cars” was in reshaping popular music that came after, including that of a lot of popular artists who would come to dominate the charts and be generally more commercial, and often less inventive. You can hear Numan’s influence in many other songs on this bracket like “She Blinded Me With Science,” “Relax,” and “It’s My Life.” His hand is certainly all over the Goth and Industrial music I danced to as a teen and college student taking the train– not a car — to clubs in DC and NYC.
Numan has said Cars is awkward to perform live as there’s not much to sing.
The song doesn’t follow popular music’s standard verse chorus verse chorus structure. During the instrumental stretches all he has left to do is shake the tambourine and look into the vastness of the replicant army. Numan is handsome but the way he presented himself on TV when he performed was cold, removed, synthetic, anti-charismatic but completely compelling.
Because Earth 2’s Tubeway Army never lucked into a synthesizer and remained a standard punk band they never reached the greatness that is Gary Numan’s solo career. Yet the Earth 2 band would probably still be good enough that an alternate earth Elana would want to see them play Le Poisson Rouge in 2024.
But this is Earth 1 — we may have the best Gary Numan but we’re in the throes of an ongoing global pandemic and our public health infrastructure might as well be from Star Trek’s evil Mirrorverse or DC Comics evil reality, Earth 3.
I doubt I’ll be able to go to see Numan’s big tour. I caught COVID in December 2022 and I’m STILL not fully recovered yet. I can’t risk catching it at a concert. But Gary Numan is ever a Futurist. He’s offering an online concert for the reasonable price of €6 or $6.50 for a 7 day rental. Technology like this helps us avoid the virus. We can even watch together remotely, live chatting and streaming together.
I can listen to you
It keeps me stable for days
On Earth 1, for the first time in my life the safest way for me to get somewhere is in our private car. Driving itself didn’t get safer, but COVID and the end of mask mandates on public transit changed the math of Earth 1 and changed my body.
I’m still struggling with the after effects of my “mild” case of COVID. For now I am unable to do some of the things I rely on, like walking everywhere. With too much activity I get vertigo and migraines. This never happened before. It should pass but for many who suffer from Long Covid it doesn’t.
I’d been privileged enough to avoid catching COVID for a long time. When I got it in December it was either outside at a holiday market or while I was wearing an N95 mask in a public bathroom. If COVID exists on other earths Elana certainly wouldn’t catch it that way. Maybe if COVID hits other earths they would require masks while spread is high (some places here do still require masks).
The ruling class knows what it takes to make shared spaces safe: air filtration, UV light, PCR tests and N95 masks. They’re demanding it and getting it. If enough people unite to demand a real public health response from institutions on this earth, we could safely gather too.
But without any mitigations it’s far too easy to catch a disabling disease on mass transit. Or at a show. In all those places I used to love and felt safe in.
When the pandemic began, walking went from being one of the options I enjoyed to being my only escape. I’d put my headphones on and log more steps than ever before. Now that I’ve had COVID I can’t even do that anymore.
The song “Cars” is a sympathetic critique of the isolation created by our fear of being vulnerable. But isolation is one of my greatest fears. As an extrovert who also can’t afford to be sick, COVID has been emotionally exhausting and frequently isolating.
Now in the fifth year of the global pandemic so often my spouse and I are stuck as a unit of two in our private car. One thing we can control is the stereo.
Will you visit me, please
If I open my door in cars?
If you want to ride with us we can all don N95 masks and open the windows for air circulation. We will look like we’re from the future. Share playlists instead of mix tapes. You won’t see half my face but we won’t be alone, and we won’t be forcing others to be alone either.
This essay was written for March XNess an annual music essay writing competition. Learn more — https://marchxness.com/
