Thursday, July 14, 2016

The Cars: Heartbeat City

THE CARS: HEARTBEAT CITY (1984)

1) Hello Again; 2) Looking For Love; 3) Magic; 4) Drive; 5) Stranger Eyes; 6) You Might Think; 7) It's Not The Night; 8) Why Can't I Have You; 9) I Refuse; 10) Heartbeat City.

I must say, it still feels good to be so completely free of Eighties nostalgia that it is possible to openly state — Heartbeat City sucks from start to finish, despite being such an immaculately crafted product. I can enjoy some of the individual songs, and I can sometimes find things of deeper value behind the superficial pop gloss, but on a general, simplified scale Heartbeat City is a musical disaster. All of the Cars' records have «dated» to a certain extent, but none of them more so than this collection of bright, shiny mid-Eighties pop nuggets, fashioned so exclusively for the sake of commercial success and nothing else.

The band took a lengthy break after Shake It Up, during which Ocasek and Hawkes released their first solo albums and also had themselves plenty of free time to take a good look at the world's trending directions. Two trends that seemed obvious were: (a) «guitar bands are on their way out» with synth-pop and digital technology on the rise; (b) MTV power. Consequently, once they finally got together for the next effort in mid-1983, enlisting Robert "Mutt" Lange to pro­duce the album (you can't go wrong with a producer who was able to cover even AC/DC and Def Leppard in gold!) and relocating to London for the sessions (European flavor!), the two most important things were — get rid of most of the guitars in favor of synthesizers and electronic drums; and produce as many videos as possible, most of which, it has to be admitted, were far more innovative and fun than the songs they were supposed to accompany.

Oh sure, Heartbeat City has plenty of hooks — cold, mechanical, robotic ones; not cold enough to be Kraftwerk-icy and haunting, though, but simply cold enough to feel as plastic and lifeless as the opening ghostly vocals that greet you with their "hello... hello again". The entire track is a mix of several different, but equally simplistic synth parts (the main eight-note synth riff sounds like two robots vomiting in sync), toughened up with power metal guitar chords in the chorus, and no amount of tragedy in Ocasek's voice can salvage the garbage melody (which is garbage not because it is synth-pop, but because it is bad synth-pop: where Depeche Mode could tune their electronics to convey sadness, disillusionment, or even horror, ʽHello Againʼ and its ilk just sound like repetitive beeps and bleeps).

Uptempo pop songs like ʽLooking For Loveʼ and ʽYou Might Thinkʼ simply sound awful, and I would never accept arguments like «well, The Cars sounded like everybody sounded back in 1978, and now they just sound like everybody sounded in 1984 — what's the big deal?», because not everybody sounded like this in 1984, but only everybody obsessed with capitalizing on the latest trends, and the latest trends were «more synthesizers, less intelligence»: ʽYou Might Thinkʼ rides almost entirely on one five-note keyboard sequence (once you've heard the first two seconds of the song, believe me, you've heard pretty much everything), and relates to ʽGood Times Rollʼ in about the same way in which a Britney Spears «pop» song would relate to a Beatles one. Why the heck did it chart? Simple — because of the video, which was one of the first videos to use computer graphics, and combined computer effects with sleaziness to perfection. And don't even get me started on ʽMagicʼ, with its three-chord power riff and arena-rock chorus that sounds like very bad Boston. Was it really that hard to invest just a little more time and energy in such a thing as composing?

Ultimately, I count two out of ten songs that still have a magic touch to them after all these years. I should be hating ʽDriveʼ as a synth-heavy adult contemporary ballad, deeply derivative from 10cc's ʽI'm Not In Loveʼ; truth is, I have always been enchanted by Orr's vocal part — and the synth textures and ethereal overdubbed harmonies agree with it very well. Unlike most of every­thing else here, this track actually has soul, and plenty of psychologism: somehow, it just captures that «late night depression» vibe to perfection, and if you're ever in need of a little seance of self-pity, locked all alone in your room and stuff, ʽDriveʼ should be among the first tracks on that mixtape. Alas, Orr never replicates that success — already on his second ballad, ʽWhy Can't I Have Youʼ, he sounds plastic, manneristic, and theatrical in comparison.

The only other track that redeems the record is ʽHeartbeat Cityʼ itself (a.k.a. ʽJackiʼ on the ori­ginal US edition of the album). Uptempo and electronic like everything else, it is actually a deep­ly melancholic ballad that takes the «fun side» of the album and turns it on its head — the lyrics are somewhat enigmatic (nobody really knows who Jacki actually is, and why is it that every­thing depends on her presence or absence), but the feeling is quite unambiguous: one of being trapped, without hope of escape or change, in «Heartbeat City». You can just think of it as a song of lost love, or, like I like to do, you can expand it to include a bit of that old Roxy Music-influenced melancholic decadence — looking for true feeling and passion in a hedonistic-materialistic world ("there's a place for everyone under Heartbeat City's golden sun", etc.). In any case, this is the only track on the entire record where the looped synth pattern actually conveys emotion and per­fectly agrees with Ocasek's sorrowful vocal part.

It would be useless to give the album a thumbs down — it has pretty much passed on to legend, and it will take yet another wave of general disgust (this time, retrospective, which is much harder) for generic Eighties production and commercialism to give it a proper spanking, which a single negative rating could hardly hope to trigger. More importantly, I find it hard to condemn an album which still contains occasional flashes of inspiration and even genius: ʽDriveʼ and ʽHeartbeat Cityʼ are unimpeachable, and show that The Cars certainly did not «run out of talent» by 1983 — they just let themselves be sidetracked with the temptation of getting back on that elusive cutting edge. But «great album»? Come on now, it's a frickin' sellout — look the word up in encyclopaedias, and eventually you'll find a certain Peter Phillips art piece illustrating it.

16 comments:

  1. Nailed it again. Although I also kind of enjoy "Looking for Love" as well. As for "Drive" and "Heartbeat City," those were, for some time over the past decade, my "most played" songs based on iTune's stats. And I should *hate* "Drive" because it was played to death back in the day. But it really is a great song. (And of course I must appreciate the 10cc connection.)

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  2. "because not everybody sounded like this in 1984"
    You mean Metallica and Fate Warning did not make glossy pop?

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  3. Though I will defend Heartbeat City to the death as a sentimental favorite, I can't help but agree with most of your points. One thing, though: the vocal on "Why Can't I Have You" belongs to Ocasek. Can't wait for the Door to Door review next week!

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  4. Nope, then I'll be the one to disagree. Nothing about these compositions is less complex or dumber than their previous work. It's really only the instrumentation that has changed. The synth riffs that are derided as simplistic here would have been called "catchy" if they had been played by a guitar on a previous album. This is a prime example of Rockism. There was shit pop music in the 80s. This is not it.

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    1. Fine, how about 'Magic' then? The base melody of 'Magic' is a guitar riff, not a synth riff, and it sucks just as hard as the synth riffs. Listen to the interplay between the guitars and the synths on 'Just What I Needed', then go back to 'Magic' and tell me again that "nothing about this is less complex and dumber". I'll admit that there was much shittier pop music in the 80s, for sure, but I'd prefer to judge The Cars against themselves rather than against Modern Talking.

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    2. Magic might have a very simple chord progression at its core, but I do not think that you can really hold that against it when My Best Friend's Girl, which revolves around exactly the same I-IV-V progression, was received much more positively a couple of weeks back. I also think there is a lot of layering of both synth tracks and rather restrained guitar parts in many parts of this song (yes, not the verses) that get dismissed as "glossy 80s production" but are actually quite pretty and carefully arranged to my ears.

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    3. I respectfully disagree. The base progression may be the same, but there's a fairly complex "woven" pattern of rhythm and lead guitar, and that's not to mention the "I Will" quotation in the chorus. 'Magic' does not do anything like that, and places most of the emphasis on the vocal hook. Of course, in the end it all comes down to gut reaction - well, you know mine, and I know yours.

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    4. Yeah, let's leave it that. Especially since I DO agree that the bouncy I Will riff is super fun.

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  5. Even up against such juggernauts as Born In The USA and Purple Rain, this album defines the summer of '84 for this suburban American WASP. Here's my take:
    http://everybodysdummy.blogspot.com/2013/05/cars-5-heartbeat-city.html

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  6. Nope. This was and is a good record. If you were there in 1984, it still holds water.

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    1. You shouldn't have to have been around in '84 for it to hold water. To my 1992-born ears it is a disappointment, coming off a string of four good or great albums.

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    2. There's a certain "spirit of the times" you can only truly understand if you where there.

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  7. It's prime industry product that defines the 80's, along with "Purple Rain", "Born In The USA", "Thriller", and "Synchronicity." If you were a teen in the 80's, it was a typical RCA Music Club "highlight" that you paid a penny for, along with 12 other items, in order to get the 1 or 2 tapes that you really wanted. Business as usual in the last golden summer of the music industry before Napster dropped the bottom out.

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  8. What a huge album for the boys here.

    As I have said before after their fist two albums they really did try to evolve their sound in Panorama but it just did not work and the fans reacted in kind. Shake It Up was a regroup rethink bringing back elements of the first two albums but now here I see them heading back in the Panorama direction (less guitar, more keyboards, less retro, more current, etc etc) but this time they evolved production into this super slick glossy pure 80s all the way but they kept the old hooks front and center.

    Anyway, it worked obviously.

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  9. Generally agree here. Heartbeat City's production reeks of the worst plastic-sounding tendencies of the 80s and none of the individual songs entice me in the way that the tracks on the first two albums did (heck, even Panorama and Shake It Up are more satisfying to me!). "Drive" and the title track are decent enough, and "You Might Think" and "Hello Again" aren't too bad, but the rest doesn't hit me. "Magic" is immensely stupid and generic on both a lyrical and musical level and "Why Can't I Have You" is such a stilted and unpleasant listen. A shame the band that gave us "Just What I Needed" and "Let's Go" degraded to this generic a sound and style.

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  10. The vocals are wrong for "Why Can't I Have You" That's Ocasek, everything is Ocasek except "Drive", "Stranger Eyes"(which used in the Top Gun trailer for a bit of trivia) and co-vocal with Ocasek on "It's Not the Night"--he sings most of it, Ocasek does the more sing-talking bits.

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