(6) Gary Numan, “Cars”
cut off
(13) Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill”
283-246
and will play in the final four

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 3/25/23.

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.  

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). 

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.

IF I ONLY COULD: ALISON STINE ON “RUNNING UP THAT HILL (A DEAL WITH GOD”

I was twelve or thirteen when I auditioned for the children’s choir. The director sat my mother down in his office and said very seriously, as if he had been waiting for just this moment, just this child to walk into his mildewy, Midwestern church basement: Everything about your daughter is perfect vocally.
Except there was this one thing. I couldn’t hear.
The moment recalled an earlier time when I had been banished outside to wait as an audiologist explained patiently to my mother, She can’t hear herself. People were always telling my parents things about my body as if I wasn’t living right there in it. Her kidneys will need to be tested, as ears develop the same time as the kidneys. She may have trouble with balance. I was born with no hearing on one side, my left. Due to a congenital issue, the mechanism simply wasn’t there inside my head. At least, that was the way it was always explained. It was called a fluke. I was called abnormal.
With the limited hearing I did have, I did okay. I had to; I was instructed to pass and pretend. No one else in my family is deaf, and I met no other kids or adults like me. I had no access to sign language. I read lips, never disclosing to most people my disability, never even knowing—for a long time—words like disclosure. There was a problem, though. I loved music.

Do you want to feel how it feels?

I was two or three when my father gave my mother a player piano for her birthday. It was a big deal, a surprise. I came in the door with her, having been sent off on some pretend errand. Upon our return, there was a party, people gathered in our house around the cumbersome, glossy wooden instrument, as high-backed as a whale. My babysitter sat on the piano bench. A wicker basket held the key fronts that had fallen off. It was an old piano, bought as much for its value as a historic piece of furniture as for its musical ability. It would have a hard time staying in tune. I would learn some notes because of the dried gray glue stuck to the keys, making patterns like raised scars.
Everyone screamed in delight, my mother cried. She had always wanted to learn to play. But she didn’t, not then. Her practicing would wake my baby sibling up from naps. She couldn’t get through her lessons because I would insist on sitting on her lap and banging on the keys. At least, that was the way it was always explained. No one thought or had the money at the time to get me lessons. Not the deaf girl.
My father says he used to carry me around on his shoulders and I would make up songs about everything we passed, my treehouse which would be crushed by a tornado, the creek below the highway bridge, the dog snuffling at the tulips. We lived in remote Indiana, our white house an island in an ocean of corn fields, but I would sing in the front yard, performing for no one. Every rise of the dirt road gave me hope. Maybe someone was coming, maybe a car from the city would stop. I would sing when we went to fast food restaurants, sing as we waited in line.
My father interested me in female musicians like Laura Nyro and The Bangles. I went to sleep every night listening to my Mickey Mouse suitcase record player. Once I found Tori Amos, it was all over. I started recording the songs I wrote onto cassette tapes via a handheld player, tapes which I gave to my best friends. They traded them like cards.
In college, I sang at open mic nights, but quickly dropped my performance major, switching to English. It seemed safer, better suited to what I believed I was, what I had been told. Half in silence, I dipped my toe into a river of sound but I couldn’t swim it. I didn’t know it or understand it. You write things most music majors wouldn’t think of, my piano professor said, in the same breath childing me again for failing to count, for being so sloppy. Someone so musical should be better, he told me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him: I heard differently. I heard less. I heard as if I was buried underground, shouting for the living to come find me.
After college, I dated a drummer who had a Fender Rhodes set up in his basement practice space. While he cooked dinner upstairs, I would perform to the darkness. In the shadows, I imagined an audience who didn’t know about my deafness, who couldn’t hear it in my voice, or who didn’t care.
The drummer said my disability interfered with my confidence, and he was right, though it wasn’t disability so much as it was ableism, how I was described by others as everything from stuck-up to flighty when I didn’t answer them. I lived in fear of my name being called. When I couldn’t follow conversations, which was often, I dropped out. You need a life not in your head was another wise thing he said. But only in my head could I hear music perfectly and be received by the world as if I belonged there.

Tell me we both matter, don’t we

Being drawn to a thing that will never love me back—it’s like a bad relationship, which Kate Bush lays open in “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God).” It’s the bargaining stage in that song, which is a stage of grief. I will reach God, I will deal with him alone. And it’s the definition of empathy. If only you lived in my body, then you would understand. You would not treat me this way.
I moved backward through Kate Bush’s discography, discovering 1996’s The Red Shoes first, the year of its release. I went to the record store specifically to buy that album. A teen, I had read about it in a newspaper review. I have a vivid memory of plucking out the CD, can see its cover of red pointe shoes even now. It rested in the front of the new releases and I drew it from the bin like it was meant for me.
Here was a girl who had started by playing an organ she found in a barn. Here was a woman giving everything, giving her all every time, who didn’t care how she sounded—and who sometimes sounded rough, coarse, ugly. She barks in “Hounds of Love,” snarls (with sword) in “Babooshka.”
And in “Running Up That Hill,” she pleads. It’s vulnerability that comes through. It’s also loss. “If I only could” implies that you can’t. You can’t ever. You tried and didn’t work. You tried and tried and are so tired of trying. You will not make it up that hill without divine assistance—and that kind of help isn’t coming. Not anymore, not for you. You are your first and only help.

There is thunder in our hearts

You talk yourself out of things, but the world talks you out of them too. The older I got, the less it seemed feasible, this music thing, even as an amateur. I had a kid. Parents don’t go to open mic nights, sing in beer-soaked bars. Single mothers definitely don’t. I wasn’t going to waste babysitter money to embarrass myself. I lived in New York and my then-husband thought I was being too loud with my keyboard, so I stopped playing it. We lived in the same building as a professional guitarist and I would sometimes find his guitar picks in my laundry. I collected them like stones. If I could have made a path with them. If I could have picked a quieter instrument. If I only could.
Last December, I got sick. Not with COVID, with another respiratory infection, the kind I’m prone to. But this one settled itself in my ear. I felt the world switch off as the hearing I do have diminished. I lived life underwater, waiting for the steroids and antibiotics to work, and the whole time, I kept thinking, music.
The worst part about getting older is that it feels too late to switch lives. In many ways, becoming a writer was the path of least resistance. You write alone in your room. No one has to see you. No one has to hear you. Many people don’t know about my deafness unless I tell them, and sometimes even still, they don’t believe me, the curse of those whose disability is often hidden. If I only could switch places, not with someone who could hear, but with someone brave. Brave enough to go on stage, not knowing for sure if their name has been called, not able to hear any comments from the crowd, any feedback. Swimming without being able to sense the depth of the water, feeling only its darkness and its pull.
I think of Kate Bush as the bravest artist I know. Going for it with the costumes, the dancing (the miming!) and the openness. To be so raw. To give so much—and then to go away. Fans of her know what it’s like to love someone you probably won’t experience in performance. In a way, that makes the music even more precious. It exists in this form in your hand alone. To sing like a secret. To have the courage to go for it, then to go away back into yourself and the private mystery of your song. I understand it. I do.
I have never heard and likely never will hear “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” in stereo. But still in mono, it shines. It gives me a bright flare of hope every time: maybe I can change. Maybe there is still time. Maybe I can run up that hill, over that building, get on that stage, and sing with no problems.

Alison Stine’s most recent novel Trashlands was longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her first novel Road Out of Winter won the Philip K Dick Award. Also the author of three books of poetry, her next novel Dust, about a partially deaf girl who must convince her remote community a second Dust Bowl is coming, will be published by Wednesday Books/Macmillan in 2024. You can find her on Instagram or playing the keyboard and singing as long as no one is home.