first round
(6) Gary Numan, “Cars”
schooled
(11) The Korgis, “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime”
287-76
and will play in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/10/23.
Cars on Alternate Earths: elana levin on “cars”
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.
Art by Jerry Ordway
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—give Gary your vote.
“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 alternate earth Elana would want to see them play Le Poisson Rouge in 2023.
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 and I’m 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.
As I write this in February 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).
Art by Carmine Infantino & Murphy Anderson,
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 fourth 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.
Elana Levin podcasts at the intersection of comics, geek culture and politics as Graphic Policy Radio and Deep Space Dive: a Star Trek Deep Space Nine Podcast. Elana’s critical work has appeared in The Daily Beast, Wired Magazine, BBC Radio, Graphic Policy, and Comics Beat and more. Elana enjoys explaining why Hair Metal is actually camp on the finest music podcasts and in March Badnesses. Elana is @Elana_Brooklyn on “the socials" and teaches digital strategy to progressive campaigns and nonprofits.
eternal sunshine of the spotless cover: rachel alm on “everybody’s got to learn sometime”
Change your heart, look around you
Change your heart, it will astound you
I need your lovin' like the sunshineEverybody's got to learn sometime
Everybody's got to learn sometime
Everybody's got to learn sometimeChange your heart, look around you
Change your heart, will astound you
I need your lovin' like the sunshineEverybody's got to learn sometime
Everybody's got to learn sometime
Everybody's got to learn sometimeI need your lovin' like the sunshine
Everybody's got to learn sometime
Everybody's got to learn sometime
“Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” is an outlier, even in a field of outliers like this one. It exhibits a majesty that you don’t often hear in a one hit wonder. The song swells with dignity and solemnity; there is so much that the song and its few simple words can barely hold it all. The lyrics emerge so simply and assertively, they are practically unquestionable. “So true,” people hearing it generally concur, nodding. “Everybody’s got to learn some time.” Where does this universality come from?
The song is astonishingly simple: bass; a sparse, repetitive keyboard line; a synth pad that sounds a bit like a flute; a violin solo that sounds weirdly like a sax solo; an occasional flourish of bell tree. It also features the plucking of a guzheng (that’s a Chinese zither), which their violin player half-heartedly attempted to mime with his violin on their Top of the Pops appearance.
The song went to #18 in the US in 1980. It did much better in the UK, where The Korgis were not one-hit wonders; they’d already had a hit in 1979 with the schmaltzy “If I Had You.” Born from the ashes of prog-rock band Stackridge, The Korgis were named after the Korg synthesizer (and not the adorable royal dogs). The Korgis were attempting to make it big at a time when image was important, and yet, dorky British dudes in polo shirts could still be considered cool (My mom loved Phil Collins, didn’t yours?) Synths were all the rage, of course, and Warren wanted to write something for the radio.
Having toiled in the musical trenches for thirteen years with Stackridge, James Warren and Andy Cresswell-Davis (and a rotating cast of musicians) were on a mission as The Korgis to write hits. Which makes it strange that, to fulfill that mission, Warren wrote this song; upon first blush, it does not seem at all like it was manufactured for the charts. Warren said in a later interview that “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” was intended to be about self-improvement: “I was very into Buddhism at the time and the notion that fundamental personal transformation has to be an inner thing as opposed to an outward, political movement and the words echo that feeling: ‘Change your heart, look around you, change your heart, it will astound you..’” [1] This is a revolutionary sentiment for a pop song, a mind-over-matter approach on par with John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s assertion that “war is over (if you want it).”
In another interview, Warren said, “many people have presumed it was a kind of love song. But to me the original intent of the lyric was to be this universal Buddhist sort way of looking at relationships in life.” [2] However, songwriters are notoriously unreliable narrators. What about that “I need your loving, like the sunshine” lyric? That doesn’t sound remotely Buddhist; that sounds like a love song. So, is it a Buddhist meditation, or a standard love song? The answer is a resounding: depends on who you ask.
What’s so fascinating about “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” isn’t just the song itself, but the multitude of cover versions it’s produced. There have been many covers of this song over the past 40+ years, some of them quite successful in their own right. What is it about “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” that draws people in, over and over? The answer is elusive, because the song itself is elusive; it means something different to every listener, and that includes its interpreters.
My first exposure to this song was Beck’s cover for the soundtrack of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in 2004. Director Michel Gondry had asked Beck to record the song specially for the film. Just two years earlier, Beck had released his Sea Change album, which was a morose masterpiece, a breakup album for the ages. His version of “Everybody” was of a piece with the sound of Sea Change: string-laden, grandiose, and gloomy. In the movie, two former lovers both get a procedure done that erases the other from their memory, because remembering their relationship is too painful. [Spoiler Alert:] They do get back together, but not before reading their own files, seeing how terribly it went the last time, and questioning the wisdom of trying again. Based on this usage, one can infer that what everybody’s got to learn is that life is a depressing slog and love is a cruel joke. It’s hard not to hear this in Beck’s rendition.
Or maybe it was just hard for me, at the time. I heard this song and knew it was speaking directly to me. I had to learn sometime. It turned out that the lesson I had to learn back then was that it was not worth driving to Burbank every weekend for a guy who insisted that what Roman Polanski had done to that girl was irrelevant, because the seventies were a different time, and because Chinatown is a great movie. I will concede that that’s a very specific life lesson that only I could have gleaned from the song, but the larger point is that Beck’s version is sad.
Most interpretations of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” sound sad. In 2004, Italian bluesman Zucchero had a big hit all over Europe with his emotive, Joe Cocker-esque version, featuring Vanessa Carlton on backing vocals and Hailey Ecker on violin solo. Zucchero’s vocals sound regretful, like an opportunity has been missed. He performed this song solo during the “One World: Together at Home” concert staged by famous musicians via video calls during the early days of the pandemic, implying that what everybody’s really got to learn is to stay inside.
There are other versions of the song that are less disconsolate, though. One such version is by an Israeli singer named Sivan Talmor, and her interpretation is lovely and hopeful. When asked about what the song means to her, she said, “I find this song as kind of a prayer. A personal one between you and your inner soul. An honest talk to yourself. A reminder that you gotta learn to open your heart, to see all beauty and sadness around you, to open your eyes to the ones you love, and let all the emotions live through you. That’s what true living is about.” This answer is so eloquent, but, it must be noted, many more (non-repeated) words than the actual song itself. People hear what they want to hear in this song; it is the Rorschach test of pop songs.
UK dance band Baby D had a huge hit in the UK (although it didn’t make a dent here in the US) with an upbeat jungle version titled “(Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime) I Need Your Loving.” It has a dance-y beat and a rap interlude, which is anthropologically interesting in and of itself, but note the added emphasis Baby D gave to the line “I need your loving” by adding it to the title. Most (but not all) pop songs are love songs. Did Warren purposefully include the word “loving” in his song as the spoonful of sugar to make his Buddhist medicine go down? Maybe! Anyway, it seemed to work for Baby D.
Did you know there’s a second verse to this song? It’s true! Apparently the label told Warren it wasn’t necessary. (They thought it had enough words already? Bold assertion!) Warren scrapped it for the initial recording, although he did use it when The Korgis re-recorded the song in 1990 for a charity called International Hostage Release.
Everyday so confused inside
Everyday you know we live such lives
I feel so helpless
When will we see the light?
Upon review, I can see where those label guys were coming from. These lines don’t really bring anything to the party, especially the two superfluous words (“you know”). Those two syllables could have been used to describe these lives, which we are left to wonder about. (Such lives! Much wow!) Most cover versions leave off this verse, possibly because they weren’t aware of it. The Flying Pickets, however, did use this second verse in their 2005 a cappella version. (There’s always something jolly about a cappella, no matter what they’re singing.)
Andy Laycock of The Flying Pickets actually did a better job describing the timeless pull of this song than I ever could have: “Although the original is swamped in Farfisas and synths and sounds every inch the 80s classic, it's actually so much more substantial than that, like all good songs. The fact that it has been covered in so many different styles demonstrates this perfectly. Even stripped down to our acappella minimum (albeit with some added bells and whistles!), it still stands out—many of our fans tell us it's now one of their favourites. But why? At first hearing, it's just a heartbreak ballad. A melancholy story about someone whose heart has been broken, and who cannot escape the endless pain and loss. But look a little closer... It's also a lesson learned, a self-discovery; and by the end of the song, the melancholy has given way to a dreamy feeling that while the hurt will remain in the memory, the future is open and we are stronger for the experience.” Whew, way to outdo me in my own essay, Andy (but seriously, thanks)!
There are many more versions of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime,” including covers by The Dream Academy, Erasure, Glasvegas, Sharon Corr, and even an instrumental version by the Vitamin String Quartet that Warren himself professes to be partial to. It’s been translated and sung in French, Italian, and Drents (a Dutch dialect). Richard Thompson reportedly called it the only good song to have been released in the 1980s.
Warren has copped to dashing off this song in fifteen minutes. Did he really spend that long thinking about what it meant? It seems more likely that the phrase “everybody’s got to learn sometime” sounded vaguely wise to him, and the openness of its possible meaning made it accessible to the world at large. Indeed, “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” seems to resonate with people precisely because it’s such a blank canvas. Perhaps this was Warren’s intent; what everybody’s got to learn is different for every person. Whatever big lesson it is that you personally have had to learn seems necessary and perhaps even fated by the time you’ve learned it. The list of possible revelations is endless because none of us were born knowing how to navigate life, but… everybody’s got to learn sometime, right?
As to the big question that acts with a single chart appearance always get: does Warren regret being a one hit wonder? No, he said. “The fact the song seems to mean so much to a lot of people makes me rather proud. You should never be frustrated by writing something with such a wide appeal.” [3] The song indeed has a wide appeal, but it’s notable that “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” has a “Yesterday”-like level of awareness among musicians. The continuing reverence and respect of other artists for the song, after all this time, surely must be especially gratifying for Warren and The Korgis.
Rachel Alm writes about music for RIFF and Spectrum Culture. She lives in Orange County, California (which is about two hours away from Burbank during rush hour).