Ric Ocasek’s instant hits are still hanging on.
Obituary: Ric Okasek, the singer, guitarist and songwriter for the Cars, helped define the sound of the angled-haircut 1980s with songs including “Just What I Needed,” “Shake It Up” and more.The poppiest punk band — or were they the punkiest pop band? — of their new-wave generation, the Cars grabbed plenty with their string of immediately appealing hits, more than a dozen of which made it inside the top 40 of Billboard’s Hot 100.
Look under the hood and you can understand why. Beneath the shiny surfaces and the metronomic grooves, the Cars’ songs, which Ocasek wrote and which he and Orr alternately sang, sported all kinds of musical and emotional eccentricities that made them hard to shake. “Who’s gonna pay attention to your dreams?” Orr sings, “And who’s gonna plug their ears when you scream?” It’s a chilling vision made only more so by the loveliness of Ocasek’s melody., bitching about the lousy songs on his car’s FM radio — worked hard to create music that could tell both a short story and a long one. He and Orr formed the Cars in Boston after trying out a variety of other modes, including post-hippie folk-pop in a group called Milkwood.
His understanding of the importance of visuals — here was a guy with a durable look — extended to his licensing the group’s music to movies, as when “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” used “Moving in Stereo” to soundtrack an iconic scene featuring Phoebe Cates.
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