HOWARD HUSOCK: No More ‘Little Deuce Coupe.’
Reports based on Federal Highway Administration statistics show a dramatic drop in the number of teenagers choosing to get driver’s licenses—down nearly 50% among 16-year-olds since the 1980s. But no one who follows popular music should be surprised by the decline. The golden age of hit songs about cars is now firmly in the cultural rearview mirror.
The song widely considered to be the first rock’n’roll hit was about a car. “Rocket 88,” recorded by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats featuring Ike Turner in 1951, described a six-passenger Oldsmobile. “Step in my Rocket and don’t be late / We’re pullin’ out about half past 8,” crooned Brenston to an unnamed girlfriend, who likely cuddled up to him in the front seat, sans seatbelts.
The ’50s and ’60s would see a jam of similarly celebratory songs. Plenty of hits told stories of cars in fast-paced detail, notably Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down,” about a Cadillac with a “full Murphy bed in my back seat.” But even confining the list to songs with car names in the title leads to a hit parade.
Back in May of 2009, in a Wall Street Journal article titled, “The End of the Affair,” the late P.J. O’Rourke wrote an encomium to cars, which the Obama-Biden administration was then just beginning its war on (as part of its still-ongoing war with many other aspects of American life), that was also at times, an encomium to the suburbs:
But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.
Eight years later, self-driving cars began to first emerge, and Charles Cooke warned of “The War on Driving to Come.” Or as Iowahawk warned right around the same time, America “needs a Second Amendment protecting the right to keep and bear cars.”
