Hoops "Cars and Girls"

Friday, December 17, 2021

Last week I featured an important song in the Japanese city pop genre and made the comparison to sophisti-pop, which came from the UK. This week I wanted to feature some sophisti-pop for comparison, but didn't want to go straight at it. So what we have here is Hoops covering Prefab Sprout (one of the more influential bands in sophisti-pop) staple "Cars and Girls."

From The Beach Boys “I Get Around” to American Graffiti to Sixteen Candles or even Ferris Bueller's Day Off, cars and girls were central to the post-adolescent male imagination in the sixties through the eighties. The song explores when adulthood blooms and exposes the shallow thinking of youth. When life’s bigger problems come in, they start to crowd out the less important things we thought that carried so much weight when we were younger. As the apostle reminds us, “But now that I have become a man, I’ve put an end to childish things.” (1 Corinthians 13:11, CEB)

In the video, the band poses, preens and prances around in an 80’s bimmer. The video is so tongue-in-cheek that it becomes almost unbearable at times, but the band’s mastery of the classic song more than compensates for the silliness.