The good times are purely theoretical, while love is inconvenient and probably impossible. Either the pop audience has grown decidedly unromantic or it's just not looking too closely. Somehow, these bands' poker-faced delivery allows a vast, half-listening public to perceive them as cute, hip, friendly pop slingers. Though the implicit irony of using bleached-blond singers as calculated "sex symbols" never registers, the catch phrases hit home, context be damned. Do young lovers in radioland hum "Just What I Needed" at tender moments? I suspect they do.

Success has made all three groups more open, more extreme. The Police revealed themselves as musical experimentalists and writers of disposable lyrics on Ghost in the Machine, and Blondie's brain trust tried art-snob genre hopping on Autoamerican and Kookoo. For the Cars' superb 1980 album. Panorama, Ric Ocasek wrote about feeling estranged from (and by) the big time, while the band went gung-ho progressive eclectic leap from the lean nonchalance of the first two Cars LPs toward (relative) sincerity.

Coming after Panorama. Shake It Up is a full fledged quandary, from the outside in The cover, designed by drummer David Robinson, looks like a cheesy picture disc package, a far its from the group's usually elegant graphics The lyrics suggest that Ocasek has succumbed to the misogynous love kills notions of his fellow arena bands. And the tunes penned in dark, minor keys, with insistently mechanical rhythms and cold, metallic mixes enforce distance detachment disbelief.

They hook you anyway. The Cars have been pop encyclopedists from the start, but unlike such pastiche-mongers as ELO, they tend to twist what they borrow (Only when they annex the entire approach of a more obscure group "A Dream Away," for example, owes too much to Mash and the Pan do their ethics seem questionable) Generally, a familiar lick grabs you just long enough for the Cars' own peculiarities to sink in. Sometimes they'll go for an obvious reference, like Greg Hawkes' Del Shannon-style keyboard blips in "Shake It Up" Lately, however, they've learned to tweak the ear very subtly. In "Victim of Love." for instance, the instrumental chorus summons the chord progression from the Everly Brothers' "All I Have to Do Is Dream" (a song as naive as "Victim of Love" is cynical) for a wordless comment on both compositions.

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