What’s Your Favorite Music Video Car?

Stars love their cars, and cars tell stories, so it simply makes sense that cars have been the stars of some great music videos. From the film for MIA’s “Bad Girls,” a tribute to Tafheet hooning popularized in Saudi Arabia, to the visual of a Diablo SE30, a Ferrari F40, and a Ferrari 355 tearing through the desert and canyons in the video for Jamiroquai’s “Cosmic Girl,” the right cars in the right music video can really set the mood.

Today on Autopian Asks, we’re asking you for your favorite music video cars, and to get the ball rolling with a few examples, I’ve selected some alternative choices you probably weren’t expecting.

One great candidate is the banana-shaped fourth-generation Grand Am coupe from the Bloodhound Gang’s “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” because a silly song with a silly video deserves an equally silly car. We’re talking lyricism like “Power drill the yippee bog with the dude piston” here, roller-coaster innuendo well-suited to a more suggestively phallic visual than a C3 Corvette.

Also, did I mention it’s driven by Bam Margera in a vest and wraparound sunglasses? The whole thing’s just such a cultural time capsule from the mid-2000s, not in a fighter-jets-and-freed0m-fried way, but a jokey, goofy, nerdy, somewhat-crass suburban white boy way. The art car fits perfectly, although weirdly, it’s not the off-kilter music video car that’s seared itself deepest into my brain. The one stuck in my head right now is somehow even weirder, and it only got a minor cameo in its music video.

See, in context, the banana Grand Am from “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” makes sense. It’s an intentional commitment to a bit, a deliberate art project with an overt, undeniable purpose. Here’s a project that’s less absurd yet still offers up a serious dose of nostalgia: “Move Along” by the All-American Rejects.

Come on, you know this one. It’s a punchy radio-friendly pop-punk anthem telling listeners that no matter how awful their day gets, they just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. That day itself will never happen again, and before you can think about things getting better, you first just have to make it through it. It’s the sort of friendly message that really gets the people going. As you’d probably expect from the theme of the song, the music video itself is interspersed with snapshots of tribulations including a couple quick shots of a car wrapped around a pole, and the car itself has been an unanswered question in my head for decades.

See, we’re looking at a first-generation Dodge Intrepid, one of Chrysler’s smash-hit cab-forward cars that made everything in the ’90s go all bubbly. However, the original Intrepid never came with sealed-beam headlights. Someone, presumably an art director, loosely mounted two smashed rectangular sealed-beam lights to the front of this Intrepid, likely solely for the aesthetic. Composite plastic lenses don’t shatter the same way glass ones do, so these old-school units serve up a different look than what you’d naturally get. However, they also have the side effect of making the car virtually unrecognizable from this frame alone.

Curiously, the headlights aren’t the only alteration to this fated Intrepid. The next shot shows the car in profile, revealing what looks to be some sort of vinyl roof. Is it a full faux-cabriolet top or a laundau affair? We don’t know thanks to the blocking of the shot, but either way, a vinyl roof on a first-generation Intrepid is weird. This was a huge futuristic leap forward for the family sedan, so to adorn it with the trappings of 1970s machismo seems utterly bizarre, like dressing a humanoid robot in a polyester leisure suit.

The end result is a fever dream of a Dodge Intrepid with bizarre frog-eyed sealed beams and a dowdy roof that deals mesmerizing psychic damage every time I see it. It might not be the best music video car in the history of the medium, but it’s one of my favorites. So, what’s your favorite music video car? Is it the Diablo doing awesome windmill donuts in “Get Your Roll On,” the iconic big Healey in “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” the MTX Tatra V8 in that video from the rapper who’s in cultural time-out right now, or something else? As ever, let me know in the comments below.

Top graphic credit: Bloodhound Gang/Geffen