Ric Ocasek’s Eternal Cool | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/ric-ocaseks-eternal-cool
Ocasek sang most of their other hits. The Cars combined the pleasures of New Wave synth modernity with the pleasures of bar-band guitar rock, in a style made especially distinctive by Ocasek’s borderline eerie vocals and aesthetic: starkly bold attire, black shades, black hairdo with a hint of fright wig. As a singer and a presence, Ocasek both channelled powerful emotion and seemed to float above it, as mysteriously as the ever-present sunglasses that obscured the look in his eyes. The Cars released their self-titled début in 1978; it was an instant classic. (I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to FM radio in my home town without hearing one of its songs in a rock block.) The album’s first track, “Good Times Roll,” is a strangely dispassionate call to revelry: mid-tempo, instructing, cool, hovering aloof above the notion of good times. It begins with spare, locomotive guitar. Ocasek commands us to let the good times roll, knock us around, make us a clown, leave us up in the air—but it doesn’t sound as if he’s going to do these things. Whereas the beloved 1956 Shirley and Lee song “Let the Good Times Roll” feels like a party—an instant get-on-the-dance-floor—the Cars are doing something stranger. Rock and roll is all about good times, but the Cars aren’t going to just lob them at us: instead, Ocasek invokes them for us to engage in, then leans back to watch what we do, like some kind of good-times fetishist.
His vocals on the album’s other singles retain that weird cool, but they add emotions we can detect, even feel. “My Best Friend’s Girl” begins with penetrating guitar, hand claps, and vocals, but then plunges into friendly pop and gang’s-all-here backup singing. When Ocasek sings “She’s dancing ’neath the starry sky” and adds, “She’s my best friend’s girl / and she used to be mine,” it hurts, sweetly, and we begin to understand him as a human.
Since I learned of Ocasek’s death, I’ve been pondering the nature of the Cars’ particular sound, and how, early on, they differed from their fellow New Wave artists and synth enthusiasts. For one thing, they employed the sounds of modernity and machinery without being woo-woo about it; they weren’t art rock à la Bowie and Brian Eno, or Kraftwerk, or Joy Division. Today, I saw that, in 1978, Ocasek, when asked by the Globe about rumors that the Cars had sought production by Eno, said, “No, we have enough oblique strategy already. If we had any more, we’d be on a space capsule headed for Mars.” They didn’t want Mars—they wanted to go their own way, unique and on the ground