Ric Ocasek

Rick Ocasek, the leader of one of my favorite bands, the Cars, died in September.

My time writing this blog has seen the deaths of members of some of my favorite bands, specifically Ray Manzarek, Keith Emerson, and Greg Lake, as well as of others who, though not among my absolute favorites, were still immensely talented musicians whose work I enjoyed, like Tom Petty and David Bowie.  I haven’t blogged about any rock star deaths (with the exception of a brief mention of Clarence Clemons), but I felt that I had to blog on Ocasek because the Cars were a band for whom the height of their success aligned significantly with own life; Heartbeat City was one of the first albums (if not the first album) that I ever bought, back when albums came in the form of cassette tapes.  

The Cars were kind of a classic rock band, and kind of an alternative band.  And some people even see them  as something of a punk band, or at least punk-adjacent, but to me they sound more like an art rock band that played only shorter songs.  And whatever they were, they had lots of Top 40 songs in the Eighties, which shows how much better popular music in the Eighties was than popular music today, because today a band that awesome (if one still existed) couldn’t get within a mile of the Top 40.  

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Coincidentally, just prior to Ocasek’s death, I was considering writing a humorous blog post about giving up on the modern world entirely, and going “Full Generation X”.  

(I don’t know what particular aspect of modern life would spur me to abandon it, but I suspect that it might be K-pop, which, for those who don’t know, is an entertainment phenomenon in which a group of twenty to thirty 14-year-old Asian Michael Jackson impersonators performs synchronized dance moves.) 

Once I went Full Generation X, my personality would undergo profound changes, including:

*I would speak only in quotes from the movie Heathers.  

*My memory would start to get fuzzy around the last year of Seinfeld, and would end entirely following the final season of Friends.

*Whatever cognitive processes that had once occurred in my brain would be replaced completely by Cars songs.