Song and Car Theft
Unlike film, song has
rarely exploited the topic of automobile theft. Its conspicuous absence is ironic,
given that particularly since World War II the car has been at the center of
popular music.6 Yet, on the few occasions where the act of stealing
cars has been featured in lyrics, themes common to those used in films emerge,
but with a far more desperate and dark tone. Car theft as connected to
adventure and sexuality stand out in Joe Bonamassa’s “Tennessee Plates” (2011)
and Sting’s “Stolen Car,” (2003) but then so does failure, the end of relationships,
and loneliness. These endings are little different than that experienced by
Jesse Lujack in Breathless.
The psychological
highs from reckless abandon gained by illegal mobility, however, eventually
leads to dire straits. Employing a story not terribly different than that of Bonnie
and Clyde,"Tennessee Plates[JH1] "
(first performed by Randy Travis in 1998) tells the listener of a girl
“shivering in the dark” on a cold night, and how that begins a tale of bank
robberies, car thefts, an exhilarating ride crossing “the Mississippi like an
oil slick fire,” and a man left for dead on the interstate. Yet the trip ends
in confusion, for the hero wakes up in a hotel room “in original sin,” with no
answers to his current dilemma.7
Of all the
songs featuring car theft, perhaps the best known--and the one with the deepest
psychological overtones--is Sting’s “Stolen Car” (2003). About a poor boy who hotwires
a rich man’s
car, the song’s lyrics, coupled with its rhythm, reach deep inside the
listener, evoking a sensual experience involving adultery, the lingering smell
of cologne, and the coming into light while surrounded by darkness:
Late at night in summer heat. Expensive car, empty street
There’s a wire in my jacket. This is my trade
It only takes a moment, don’t be afraid
I can hotwire an ignition like some kind of star
I’m just a poor boy in a rich man's car
So I whisper to the engine, flick on the lights
And we drive into the night8
Like that of Sting,
Bruce Springsteen’s “Stolen Car” (1980) possesses a dark angst, perhaps
connected to adultery. The common everyman protagonist agonizes over a marriage
gone bad, riding in a stolen car during a “pitch black” night, horribly fearful
and alone, desperate and at the end of the line. Yet, as Springsteen laments,
“Each night I want to get caught. But I never do.”9 Similarly, but
in the context of a very different urban environment, the Beastie Boys posit
their own take on the matter with their hip hop genre title “Car Thief” (1989).
As in all of the above songs, our character’s life is coming apart “at the
seams,” the consequence of violence, plenty of drugs, and a disconnected urban
lifestyle that has resulted in human worthlessness, with incarceration at the
“Mountain,” while Ricky cuckolds his girl.10
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