The car is a cultural anachronism only to some.

*A car speaking a thousands words (screenshot © Lawrence Turman Productions)*

Allegedly, the automobile is a pop culture icon strictly of the past. Admittedly, it has been ages since Janis Joplin sang about Swabian cars, soul-searching Benjamin Braddock took an Alfa Spider for a spin or Prince fantasised about the pleasures provided by a Little Red Corvette. In distinct contrast to these seemingly eternal monuments to the car’s cultural relevance, even today’s Fast & Furious movie franchise behemoth, which is supposedly all about cars, hasn’t borne a single truly iconic automobile.

The pop culturally aware public and feuilletons are hence united in deeming the modern automobile as (in)significant a symbol of today’s Zeitgeist as any random everyday appliance. Freedom, revolt and discernment are emblematised using other devices today - or so most feature writers would like to believe. For when looking beyond civilised realms, into uncultured territories, one gets an altogether different impression. For rock music and the movies may have lost interest in the automobile - but hip-hop and its defining figurehead, the gangsta, most certainly have not.

In gangsta culture, today’s car isn’t yesterday’s news. Along with misogyny, drug abuse and gun fetishism, an undying love of the automobile must be considered a mainstay of today’s prevailing subculture. All gangstas and wannabes, from South-Central LA to the banlieues of Paris and beyond, care deeply about what they ride in. Driving a sensible, possibly even small car without any attitude would be akin to openly admitting to impotence. In Germany, all the love the Green Party and metropolitan hipster are depriving the contemporary automobile of it receives from domestic gangstas (and their legions of epigones) instead.

*Move over, Dustin Hoffman! (image © Bravado Merchandise GmbH)*

Whereas the hipster rules the cafés, gastropubs and organic farmer’s markets, the gangsta rules the streets - literally and figuratively speaking. The loud farting noises of today’s sports cars, the aggressive graphics of many a daytime running light, the butch stance of most SUVs - each one an alleged tribute to motorsports or high performance - all happen to appeal unreservedly to the gangsta. The anti-social messages of crass ostentation, reckless consumption and egotistic bravado thus delivered resembles the mind-set of any self-proclaimed ruler of the street, down to a T. Modesty is considered the virtue of the mediocre, whereas visceral, primitive pomposity is seen as the ultimate expression of one’s strength and power.

Like most subculture archetypes, the gangsta is rooted in rebellion. Being a social outcast, quite often an immigrant, the archetypical gangsta rejects the moral rules imposed by the very society that rejected him in the first place. He doesn’t just want to earn a living, like those who look down their noses at him - he wants to hit it big and stick it to those who believe they’re better than him (yes, he’s quite obviously a male). Driving around in a car that’s flashier, louder, wider and more expensive than the ‘decent’ choice hence constitutes an act of rebellion by conspicuous consumption.

Fascinatingly, large parts of the overall gangsta aesthetic, as it evolved over the course of more than four decades, have been - unintentionally - informed by irony. Scarface, Brian De Palma’s 1982 movie on the rise and fall of a Cuban immigrant drug dealer, which has served as one of the gangsta’s leitmotifs for decades, being an exceptionally blatant case: The director and his visual consultant, Ferdinando Scarfiotti, had intentionally devised the movies’s style as an orgy of tastelessness, a sarcastic ‘celebration’ of macho baroque. This irony was obviously lost on a great many, to such an extent that Scarface’s garishness has since made its way not just into the mainstream, but the New York penthouse of a former president and, indeed, automotive design.

*Trump Tower, Montana Mansion (screenshot © Universal Pictures)*

When speaking of the United States’ 45th president, the pervasiveness of gangsta culture becomes especially apparent. «Locker room talk», mocking of «the weak» and excessive posturing with the insignia of power and success (young women, expensive cars) are not just acceptable, but welcome in this context. That the erstwhile most powerful man in the world betrayed this mindset was no mere coincidence - his acceptance, not just among certain deluded hip-hop artists, but also voting blocks that should by all accounts have been repelled by that president’s blatant racism (latinos, African-American males), suggesting that anti-decency pays off.

Generally speaking, the pop cultural success of the gangsta has rendered its initial revolutionary impetus null and void a while ago. In fact, it doesn’t take a Manhattan real estate millionaire to showcase just how hollow a rebel the gangsta is - eavesdropping on a group of posh public schoolboys’ pseudo-street tough conversations is enough to realise just how pervasive and meaningless the gangsta’s posturing has become.

The automotive realm is finding itself in a highly compromised position, as it tries to deal with the gangsta’s affections. Right now, like a political party accepting votes from extremist circles while superficially pretending to distance itself from such an unseemly crowd, large parts of the automotive industry are pandering to the gangsta in more or less covert fashion. Hence Mercedes-Benz employees, decidedly off the record, being quick to point out that these days, the letters A,M and G gracing the Swabian car maker’s most potent products are really standing for «Ausländer Mit Geld» - Foreigner/Immigrant With Money. This condescension neatly sums up car makers’ bigotry in dealing with the gangsta: unlike the hipster, they’re considered somewhat embarrassing company, but - unlike the hipster too - they happen to love cars.

This love manifests itself in tangible pop cultural terms, too. Capital Bra, Germany’s best-selling artist right now, has devoted not just some lyrics, but entire songs to the likes of ‘BMW Alpina’, ‘GTS Benz’ and ‘RS6’ over the course of his brief career. In the song ‘Mercedes’, Kurdish-German rapper, Eno, finds these words to express his devotion to the automobile: ‘That complete advance is spent on the Mercedes; the matt black polish of my Benzer only reflects the fact that I make money; in my early 20s I count more notes than a banker; (…) 12 cylinders, kick down, 240 on the speedo; my outfit, not from a discounter, just track suit, no jacket’.

Of course, the automotive industry never had any qualms selling its products to dubious customers. Moreover, blaming a company that sold its 600 limousine to Idi Amin for appealing to tracksuit wearing (wannabe) criminals would be bigoted to the extreme. However, claiming to be socially and environmentally conscious on the one hand, while clandestinely sucking up to a clientele prone to anti-social, anti-progressive attitudes is no mere inconsistency - it’s a tangible metaphor for the crossroads at which the automobile finds itself today.

In that sense, the automobile has obviously lost none of its power as a reflection of society. It still acts as a vast canvas onto which to project dreams, as well as desires. Aesthetes might bemoan and complain about the form this pop icon has taken on over the years. Yet they are outgunned, outnumbered and outbid by gangstas who don’t write about cars, but pay for them in cash.

For this and numerous other reasons, the gangsta is and remains the current defining pop cultural phenomenon. And the automobile a pop cultural icon.