We Traded Our Wings for Wheels, and Our Wheels for Widgets

Rock is dying because our love of and dependency on cars is dying.

Cars + Rock just go together. They always have. Cars + Rock are the candy coating on the chocolate center, or the chocolate coating on the peanut butter center. Except mostly they’re, like, white chocolate and very pale peanut butter and tan- or manilla-colored candy coating.

Hey, what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
Well, the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere

Cars + Rock the great American married couple. Unfortunately for both Cars + Rock, they are in the waning days of their healthy and happy lives. They might well be the great married couple of pop culture America, but they are more Archie and Edith Bunker, or Steven and Elise Keaton. They are Norman and Ethel Thayer of “On Golden Pond.”

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends

They are the old couple down the street that was maybe cool at some point, and even if not cool, they seem like decent enough people… but you sure as hell don’t want them telling you about their good ol’ days of wild sex parties, or about those times when they snorted coke off the small of that 19-year-old groupie’s back. Talk like that is just icky and creepy.

Cars + Rock are on a similar path. Neither are dead, and neither will truly die for quite some time — they’ll both outlive me, for example. However, both are evolving to become something different, something far less central to society.

But you know the summer always brought in
That wild and reckless breeze
And in the backseats we just tried to find
Some room for our knees

If you have the audacity to begin researching the number of mind-blowing, possibly-immortal rock (or rock-ish) songs where cars are a central character or driving is the dramatic arc, you’d go blind and deaf before you could list them all.

The Beach Boys loved cars more than they loved surfboards. Half of Springsteen’s ouevre is inspired by the need to see wheels as wings and the symbiotic connection between a dude and his car. Petty loved travelin’ music so much he wrote Highway Companion because he, like, really wanted you to listen to it in a car.

From the ’50s into the turn of the 21st Century, the single defining possession was your vehicle. It announced to the world that you could go anywhere (on the continent) whenever you wanted. A car was your companion, your make-out basement, your excuse to start smoking. It was the place your mom couldn’t yell for you to turn that dang music down and your dad couldn’t tell you to go mow the lawn. Most importantly for rock, the car was your ejection seat if the world you knew got too unbearable, either off a cliff or into another state and a new life.

Move over baby
Gimme the keys
I’m gonna try to tame your little red love machine

My high school car was my parents’ 1982 Toyota Corolla. That shitbrown hatchback, no matter how much I’d love to pretend otherwise, helped define me in my young life, from the fact that it was handed to me by parents who could afford to just give me their 6-year-old car. It had a faulty windshield fluid that shot over the car and could hit cars (or people) behind it, which is to say it was awkward and goofy but adorable and practical.

I found something of myself in each successive, highly flawed car. The puke green Oldsmobile. The red Tercel with black interior and no A/C. Our gold Saturn, the first car to have a baby seat thrust into the back. Our black Sienna minivan, the sign that bar golf and keg stands were fully replaced by 3 a.m. bottles and moist wipes under the driver’s seat.

You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so you can fly away

That era is coming to an end.

Cars no longer hold the throne in the minds of the young. They no longer symbolize a means to escape the trappings of youth, the trappings of the oppressive boring adult world, because the younger generation no longer has any belief that the world can be escaped by running away from physical locations.

Most millennials would happily give up their car before they gave up their smartphone (see: LA Times, 2016 or Forbes, 2014). Who needs a car?? They can Uber, or Zipcar, or Bird, or whatever. But without their phone they might as well live on a desert island… a desert island of the digital mind.

Thg big carrycase of tapes or CDs that sat shotgun on our rides to work or across the state is now it’s called Spotify or XM. It’s the bottomless cup of musical coffee you never knew you needed. Songs no longer have mass; they merely occupy memory.

You’re one of those guys who likes to shine his machine
You make me take off my shoes before you let me get in
I can’t believe you kiss your car good night

The phone is the defining possession of modern life.

Now the entire world — all of the information, all of the news, all of our friends on Snapchat and Facebook and Instagram, all of our romantic hopes— is with us, vibrating in our pockets, alight in our hands. The world is no longer something you can run away from in a car. Everything out there, and just about all of you, is a click away. You can’t even escape it by throwing your phone in the lake, because it’s still there, all around you, like the monster under your childhood bed, in your closet, in the attic, all at once.

I’ve been drivin’ all night, my hand’s wet on the wheel
There’s a voice in my head that drives my heel

Rock was music guided by the muse of the open road but the muse of 21st Century music is the phone. Just as rock steered the meaning and message of youth and young adulthood for many past generations, the phone currently sits in the driver’s seat… although given the nature of technological evolution, its reign in steering the path of popular music is doomed to be far shorter, more William IV than Victoria.

Spiderwebs. Telephone. Hotline Bling. LOL :-). Hello. Call Me Maybe.

To be sure, there have been rock songs about telephones from decades long past (“Hellooooooo baby!”), and there are plenty of modern songs that reference that Benz or that fly ride, but the frequency has fully flipped.

While we Gen Xers keep puttering down the sonic highway in our beat-up jalopies, the musical world has traded its steel wheels for data streams. Life is an information superhighway, and the new generation wants to ride it all night long. Or perhaps they just don’t see any exit ramps.

YEAR: 2008