The five most popular subjects in popular song are: 1. Love. 2. Unrequited love. 3. Cars. 4. The weather. 5. Patti Boyd.
Today we look at cars. Cars in song belong in a taxonomy from the very broad to the very specific.
Key:
At the broadest level, there are songs that celebrate all cars. These songs are the least interesting to car buffs but are just fine for everyone else. What they typically fail to harness is the intimate and specific storytelling opportunity that a specific car offers. Cars and Girls by Prefab Sprout. Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol. Life Is A Highway by Rascal Flatts (from the film Cars).
Then there are songs about specific cars that aren’t really. You can tell that the songwriter neither knows nor cares about cars by whether they mention the make and model. These songs can be very powerful, but are similarly unconvincing for the car fan. See Cars by Gary Numan and Fast Car by Tracy Chapman.
Songs about a particular car. These allow the singer to evoke a particular time, particular passengers, or doing naughty things in the backseat. See Little Red Corvette. Silver Thunderbird. Little Deuce Coupe. Petrolheads like these because they can be judgmental about the choice of car and can nitpick about things like whether the dimensions of the back seat in the 1960 Chevy afforded that level of athleticism.
At the narrow foot of the taxonomy are songs about specific features of specific cars. Billy Falcon’s ‘Power Windows’ uses the means of lowering and raising windows as the premise for a entire outlook on life. Even car buffs know that’s pushing it.
The other category of car songs is about motorbikes. See Leader of the Pack or Born to Run. These songs tend to be similar to car songs but involve more parental disapproval, willy metaphors and death.