"I could never be a country person, sitting around trees trying to write a song. I would rather be in the middle of society, whether it's growing or crumbling"
About this Quote
Ocasek skewers the romantic myth of the musician as woodland monk, patiently harvesting inspiration from trees and silence. The line lands because it treats that fantasy as not just boring, but dishonest: a pose that pretends art arrives pure when it’s actually contaminated (and energized) by other people. For him, songs aren’t pressed from nature; they’re forged in friction.
The real tell is his preference for society “whether it’s growing or crumbling.” That’s not mere urban boosterism. It’s a commitment to instability as material. Ocasek’s best work with The Cars thrived on that late-70s/early-80s mood where sleek surfaces hid anxious wiring: new-wave cool, consumer gloss, romantic detachment, the faint dread that the future is arriving too fast. He’s saying he needs the feed of a crowd, the churn of trends, the noise of ambition, the creep of collapse. Culture at its most productive looks like construction and demolition happening on the same block.
Subtextually, it’s also a quiet argument about distance. Ocasek often wrote from an emotionally removed vantage point, like a camera with a very good lens. Being “in the middle of society” lets him observe desire, status, and alienation up close without pretending to be above it. Even the phrase “growing or crumbling” suggests he’s less interested in moral judgments than in motion. A city is a synthesizer: voltage in, strange feeling out.
The real tell is his preference for society “whether it’s growing or crumbling.” That’s not mere urban boosterism. It’s a commitment to instability as material. Ocasek’s best work with The Cars thrived on that late-70s/early-80s mood where sleek surfaces hid anxious wiring: new-wave cool, consumer gloss, romantic detachment, the faint dread that the future is arriving too fast. He’s saying he needs the feed of a crowd, the churn of trends, the noise of ambition, the creep of collapse. Culture at its most productive looks like construction and demolition happening on the same block.
Subtextually, it’s also a quiet argument about distance. Ocasek often wrote from an emotionally removed vantage point, like a camera with a very good lens. Being “in the middle of society” lets him observe desire, status, and alienation up close without pretending to be above it. Even the phrase “growing or crumbling” suggests he’s less interested in moral judgments than in motion. A city is a synthesizer: voltage in, strange feeling out.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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