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Do IT this week: Layering
Detroit automaker's cars still ride spotlight in popular music, books, movies, cartoons and TV shows
By Susan Whitall
Detroit News
Published on Sunday, Sep 14, 2008
For a century, General Motors has cast a huge shadow over American popular culture, its cars inspiring songs, movies, cartoons and TV shows.
Images of GM cars abound in American music, folk and visual cultures, dating to one of the first ''car songs'': Billy Murray's In My Merry Oldsmobile, from 1905. That song became a classic recording by Jean Goldkette and his orchestra in 1927 and inspired a somewhat naughty 1932 cartoon by the Fleischer Brothers.
The image of GM's cars in popular culture has alternated between the dangerous glamour of fast cars and wild youth and the more wholesome virtues — the idea that a Chevy or Buick would deliver you to freedom and escape out on the open road of an expansive, optimistic America.
From the '50s into the '60s, girl-next-door Dinah Shore sang ''See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet'' on her popular Dinah Shore Chevy Show, accompanied by video of the dishy yet demure singer riding in a Chevy convertible full of admirers, or footage of a four-door Chevy motoring along a picturesque Western highway.
''General Motors was always seen as part of the open road, seeing America, becoming one with it,'' said Michael Marsden, who lectures on the automobile in American culture at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. ''Chevrolet was the big identifier because — but also the Corvette — it still remains the only true American sports car. There's really an affectionate connection with that car.''
Certainly Barbie, the plastic queen of our mythopoetic dreams, doesn't drive a Boxster; she waves coquettishly from a pink Corvette.
Corvette haunts dreams
The Corvette was always emblematic of summertime and California. The Beach Boys are posing by a Corvette (and a Pontiac GTO) on the cover of their album Shut Down Vol. 2.
There's a dark side to that iconic imagery. The Corvette symbolized freedom but also wantonness, the idea that cars that fast and sexy could kill. In the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly, detective Mike Hammer is speeding along a dark highway in a '54 Corvette when he almost kills a hitchhiker played by Cloris Leachman. When a gas station attendant first sees Hammer's new Corvette, which replaced his old Jag, he says: ''What's the matter, a Jag not good enough for you?'' Hammer replies, ''Yeah, the ashtrays got all full.''
But the ultimate Corvette of the '60s, the one that haunts Baby Boomer dreams is the baby blue driven by the two restless young wanderers in the 1960-64 TV show Route 66. Martin Milner as Tod Stiles and George Maharis as Buzz Murdock drove Stiles' Corvette across America's more picturesque, pre-interstate highways seeking adventure to the sound of a cool, jazzy theme song. The show's top-notch scripts, atmospheric local shoots and array of almost-famous guest stars (a young Robert Redford, a young Suzanne Pleshette) helped keep the show, and its mythic Corvette, rolling. The show's first season came out on DVD in May.
Cemented in history
Now defunct, Oldsmobile hasn't been thought of as a charismatic brand for years, but the 1951 song widely believed to be the first rock 'n' roll song ever, Rocket 88, celebrates a late '40s/early '50s Oldsmobile.
Ike Turner told the Detroit News in 2001 that he wrote Rocket 88 about his favorite car, the Oldsmobile Rocket Hydra-Matic '88, which had a powerful V-8 engine shoehorned into a sleek, compact body, and dominated NASCAR races from '49 into the early '50s. The song is credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats; Brenston was the singer/saxophone player in the Rhythm Kings with Turner. Brenston always claimed he took parts of an earlier song, Cadillac Boogie, and re-wrote it into Rocket 88, but with both men dead they'll have to argue it out in rock 'n roll heaven.
The mid-'50s Chevrolet Bel Air is another GM model that's moved past real life into folklore.
There are mythic GM cars, and then there is Cadillac. There are untold numbers of songs written about Cadillacs, thousands in the BMI database alone. The Cadillac Fleetwood, Coupe de Ville and particularly the El Dorado — a perfect mythological name — served as shorthand for success and glamour. Elvis Presley's gold 1961 Cadillac sits in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.
Today the Cadillac Escalade is an instant cultural marker of urban success, whether it's thug life success or professional.
Today's image mixed
It hasn't been 100 years of top-down happiness for GM's image in the culture. Speed bumps along the way include the clumsy handling of critics like safety crusader Ralph Nader, whose 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed made the Chevrolet Corvair a byword for automotive danger.
Then there was director Michael Moore, whose 1989 documentary Roger and Me told a David and Goliath story of a rogue filmmaker taunting an indifferent corporate behemoth for abandoning its hometown (Flint, Mich).
The company was incredibly innovative from the '30s through the '50s, before going into creative overdrive in the '60s, Marsden says.
Today Marsden sees signs of that old creative behemoth. ''They're reintroducing the new Camaro, that's a beautiful, beautiful car. Despite the pundits, I think GM has quite a future.''
For a century, General Motors has cast a huge shadow over American popular culture, its cars inspiring songs, movies, cartoons and TV shows.
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