The Cars - Shake It Up

What do you do when your artsy-type pop rock record stiffs? You follow it up with a blatant stab at commercial appeal.
And, sadly, you lose a little bit of respect in the process.
Shake It Up isn’t necessarily a bad record, it’s just a predictable and tepid affair that takes all of those potentially bad things from Panorama and turns them into, well, bad things.


That would be the layers of keyboards that have gone from nifty to kitschy here, with nearly every ounce of the band’s once mighty muscle turned into skinny tied geekdom.
It’s also the album that hasn’t aged well either. Since it’s a blatant stab at radio-circa-1981 appeal it sounds like the time capsule soundtrack they buried at the Galleria.


Speaking of, I remember running into a pair of denim-clad critics about a week after Shake It Up was release. Since I loved Panorama, I bought Shake It Up when it was released only to be thoroughly disappointed. My two classmates were pondering the new releases section and I overheard them sounding unimpressed with The Cars. “There last album sucked” said one of the fellows, adding that they had turned into some “new wave shit.”
That pissed me off, so I strangely misinformed them that Shake It Up sounded just like their debut.
A few days later, I overheard a few other guys in art class discussing Shake It Up.
“I heard that it sounds just like the first album.”


There are moments of pure joy, particularly with the opener “Since Your Gone,” which misleads the listener into thinking that the Cars’ fourth album may be that elusively refined pop record that straddles creative ingenuity with commercial appeal.


By track two-the huge hit title track-you understand that The Cars by this point in their career don’t give a shit about making a statement; they care about making a buck.


There’s a bit of redemption with “I’m Not The One,” possibly the band’s best ballad outside of “Drive,” but it’s quickly forgotten with the two pieces of pure filler (“Victim Of Love” and “Cruiser”) that complete side one.


The sleepwalking continues throughout the second side with only “Think It Over” sounding like it managed to raise the pulse of any band members.


Ocasek completely abandons any attempts at progressing as a songwriter too, seemingly taking the lumps that came after Panorama’s lofty lyrical attempts and turning them into such prose as “She’ll take it fast and she’ll take it slow/She’ll tell you things that you should not know” (“Victim Of Love”).


However, it was this lowest common denominator that struck a chord with the record-buying public, as Shake It Up was one of the band’s best selling efforts. My bitter-fueled recommendations apparently worked, even though I’m fairly certain those saps knew that it sounded nothing like the debut.


I speak of them despairingly because I know they were right: Shake It Up is nothing more than a bunch of new wave shit.