‘Give Me Your Tired’… But America’s All Out of Gas
‘Pursuit of Happiness’ has grown, since its release in 2009, to become one of Kid Cudi’s most successful songs. Feigning flashes of hope in lines such as ‘Know I lived it to the fullest’ and ‘I’ll be fine once I get it’, turn now to the album it forms part of, Man On The Moon: The End Of Day. Nestled in brackets, the term ‘(Nightmare)’ leeches onto several songs, including the one that I misnamed a moment ago, which in fact reads ‘Pursuit of Happiness (Nightmare)’. From ‘Rolling the Midwest side and out / Living my life, getting our dreams’, the lyrics gradually deteriorate in both content and style to strained, monosyllabic grunts of ‘Ugh / Oh man’, ‘Pat Zuli, wait, oh ****, Oh my God’.
Cudi’s subject races in his car across America, capriciously rejecting advice found in the opening verse to ‘Slow [his] roll’, as he incessantly chases after some promised sense of fulfilment that forever remains just one refrain ahead…
John Perry Barlow, in 2001, wrote passionately about the act of pursuing happiness, enraged and saddened in equal measure by its instillation of ‘a monstrous, insatiable hunger inside our [the American] national psyche’.
The hip-hop x electronic dance music that Cudi creates may seem far removed from the twentieth century literature that I will go on to discuss, yet ‘Pursuit of Happiness (Nightmare)’ so plainly, so perfectly speaks to a sense of emptiness that has and continues to permeate US culture by placing two key entities side-by-side – automobile and aspiration. Across the pages of American fiction and in the folds of the country’s history books, the motor vehicle has come to represent this dogged, yet desperately hollow tailing of both personal and political desires that ‘The Pursuit of Emptiness: Why Americans Have Never Been A Happy Bunch’, John Perry Barlow’s aforementioned essay, so ardently rages against.
1925 saw the publication of one of the greatest and most enduring commentaries on the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The eponymous protagonist is driven through the novel both by his aching desire, somehow beautiful in its tragedy, to be with Daisy Buchanan, who embodies all that Gatsby is not – old-money, established tradition, social puissance – and also by his Rolls-Royce. Entering the car for the first time, Nick Caraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, observes ‘a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns.’ Enamoured ambition and bleak futility coalesce behind the ‘layers of glass […] a sort of green leather conservatory’. For all the suns that Gatsby’s kaleidoscopic vision fools him into chasing, moth-like he remains hopelessly banging against the windows of a cultural ‘labyrinth’ which denies social mobility. Later in the novel, it is this ‘monstrous’ car that rips through Myrtle who races towards a misidentified Tom Buchanan in fervent search of her own American Dream, and, consequentially, murders Gatsby who is arrested in his quest for Daisy by Myrtle’s grieving husband.
Moving through the century, we stumble upon Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus. Irony drips from the title of this 1947 novel, dribbling down onto the windows of Juan Chicoy’s bus, ‘Sweetheart’, which becomes stuck in a rut en route through the Salinas Valley. Disenchanted by his mundane life trundling between Rebel Corners – another stinging moment of irony – and San Juan de la Cruz, this breakdown gives the apathetic driver an opportunity to pursue a fresh path. However, sexual liberation and fantasies about moving to Mexico fail to fully motivate Juan who snaps shut his imaginings with the click, click of ‘Sweetheart’s’ bruised engine. The bus (and the book) terminates in the place it was scheduled to, with a view of San Juan de la Cruz in the distance. The descriptions on the final page of The Wayward Bus are so glittering, so gentle; we ebb from the ‘fluttering dark’, to ‘the cloud [which] lifted the evening star’, and on to see a ‘cluster of lights […] cold and winking’. Yet these moments in the quiet beauty of nightfall are completely undercut by Juan reminding us that ‘That’s San Juan up ahead’. The mundane returns and we are anchored back on the path to– well, we know where we’re headed.
Two decades later, in 1968, Tom Woolf fanned the flames of New Journalism with the release of his book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of his time on the road – as it were – with Ken Kesey and his crew of “Merry Pranksters”. Through the haze of marijuana and maze of hallucinations, a link between their bus, ‘Further’, for so long a monument consecrated to unadulterated freedom, and sputtered desire may be spotted. As with the other characters I have mentioned thus far, the “Merry Pranksters”, too, were pursuing an ideal. “Intersubjectivity” – a state of consciousness where ‘the entire harmonics of the universe from the most massive to the smallest and most personal—presque vu!— all [flow] together’ – was what they all boarded the bus to find. Yet, as Sandy, the sound engineer, is reported by Woolf to have described, the trip was ‘liberation and captivity all at the same time, liberation, power, will, the greatest in the world-’. Just as a brisk dash cuts off Sandy’s speech, so, too, are the ambitions of the Pranksters tersely interrupted. Their journey that started in California ends in California, with Kesey doing time and the rest of his allies failing to “graduate” from acid-induced intersubjectivity to independent explorations of the mind. It seems that this perennial desire to travel “Further” terminates any potential for real development.
The motor vehicle revs its engine at these fictional characters, passive aggressively reminding them that it is time to get behind a wheel they have little control over, as they are driven past, rather than towards, their desires. It may be a stretch to tether this strange symbol of the impatient automobile to anything concrete, or “real-life”, but I think there is something to say about the car also hanging over non-fictional, historical moments that have dotted America’s twentieth century.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated on 22nd November 1963 while driving through Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas in convoy with a motorcade. His brother, Edward, or Ted, Kennedy, ten years later, was involved in a car crash on Chappaquiddick Island which killed both Mary Jo Kopechne, one of his campaign staffers, and his bid for the presidency during the 1972 election. Even now, a quarter of the way through the twenty first century, we see these liaisons dangereuses continue to play out between cars and political appetite. For it was Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, who funded, rallied behind, and celebrated Trump’s successful 2024 presidential campaign, the very same man who, in June this year, pledged the launch of his America Party, created to 'restore trust in governance' and redirect political power away from the man he once so assiduously endorsed.
I am by no means suggesting that some preternatural force puppeteers invisible strings of literal automobiles to crash the dreams of US citizens. Rather, I use the recurring motif of the road vehicle in twentieth century America as a way of accessing a penetrating sense of breathless emptiness that runs thick and deep under the surface of America. In this way, the car or bus is a metaphorical vessel, not a physical one.
Let us return to John Perry Barlow who observes America’s exertion of a ‘weird, invisible pressure to pursue happiness’. It is this driving, insistent demand for more, for bigger, for better, for greater that leaves the stomachs of inhabitants indelibly purring. And so, the deliciously ironic question of “What next?”, arises. Didion’s Play It As It Lays shows us a few avenues. Do we heed Maria’s final – perhaps only explicit – piece of advice in an otherwise aimless work of literature, to ‘know what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing’? Or do we linger, for just a moment, to ‘stand on the hot pavement and drink the Coke from the bottle’. It is perhaps only after this pause, that we will then be ‘ready to drive again’.
Tilly is a third year undergraduate student of English Literature at Durham University. Despite being a heroically slow reader, Tilly has loved her degree and hopes to apply it to a role in journalism or communications in the near future.