Single Awareness: Adam Sandler - "Ode to My Car" (1996)

If you look at the space-time continuum, it looks like the stars are finally starting to align for Adam Sandler. After almost 30 years of lowbrow comedies, he has begun to turn around in recent years, proving to the world with more consistency what he can bring to dramas with his nebbish charm. Overall he’s just become more likable and every decision seems to defy odds. He has found his deeper purpose in the filmmaking community, and he’s finally gunning for that Oscar. After all, why else would he decide to do another basketball drama after perfecting the neurotic archetype in Uncut Gems (2019)? He’s out for blood, people.

That would be a fun proposition to wonder just what exactly Sandler would do if he was ever in the Oscar conversation. Most people will likely sit around him as he approaches the podium and say “Don’t do it, Adam. Don’t…” as he pulls out that goofy grin, preparing to do a schtick he’s been doing since the early 2000s when he’d win that surfboard from the Teen Choice Awards. He’s going to make the room laugh. You think that Seth Macfarlane’s joke about seeing boobs was jarring? Well, prepare for Sandler to throw in gobbledygook that threatens to tear out the prestige of this award.

Don’t believe me? Just watch his Spirit Independent Film Awards, where he gave a speech so memorable that I’ve thought about it more often than any one Oscar speech. His comedic takedown of awards culture perfectly explained why he remains an outsider. You don’t buy that he takes anything seriously and that giving him any power will make you look ridiculous by comparison. The speech is by all means a masterpiece, serving as one of his greatest modern accomplishments, proving that he was always a man of the people. If you weren’t entertained, he wasn’t doing his job right.

That is likely why “Ode to My Car” has become one of his low key hits. Oh sure, you don’t hear it on the radio as much as “The Chanukah Song” trilogy or “The Thanksgiving Song,” but it somehow still feels indicative of who Sandler was in 1996. Considered to be one of the bad boys of Saturday Night Live, he had now broken out into making box office hits that played into his personality of a manic underdog taking his frustration out on the world. He was the biggest clown in the world, and you can define the generation gap based on how willing you are to call The Waterboy (1998) a masterpiece.

More than anything, he gave me a false reality of what a “comedy album” was. As the first big comedian that I got into, I consumed all of his media with such frequency. I visited his website, made sure that I had my seat roped off for those David Letterman appearances. I needed to be everywhere that he was. It was also in this time that I began to collect all of his albums, believing that any funny person with half a following was prone to make a cavalcade of skits and music, presenting something solely designed to make you laugh. But alas, Cheech & Chong are the only ones who really do that.

I’m embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve listened to those records. Even if I wasn’t as big on “Shh… Don’t Tell,” I’m sure my count is in the double digits. It felt surreal, especially given that Sandler’s films were often in the PG-13 rating zone. I can’t think of a single skit that didn’t have something foul and anarchic lying underneath the surface. It’s ripe with bad taste that probably hasn’t aged well, but it felt amazing that he could get away with bits about peeping toms and murdering people with your boat. For a man who seems lovable, he has a pitch-black streak that is at times downright hostile… and he gets away with most of it because it exists as a radio play, making you fill in the gaps.

The truth is that I was disappointed throughout my youth that this wasn’t what most people made when they created a “comedy album.” They relied on stand-up routines, full of crowds cheering. It’s strange in hindsight that this bothered me so much, but then again I had this belief that people like George Carlin needed to get their friends together and make this provocative art form, of a perverse story. Some like Nick Thune have added instruments to comedy, but so far Sandler remains this odd force, especially since most of his bits feel like they’re somehow separate from his bigger celebrity.

The Genius page is also great

Yet every now and then I will hear someone currently in their mid-30s who will put on “Ode to My Car,” and I want to give them this smiling nod. In the history of music, there have been few songs as reflective of the automotive experience quite like this. Sure, “Weird Al” Yankovic had a few songs about the rundown nature of consumerism, but even he didn’t have the insight to make a song so profane through the guise of a Bob Marley and The Wailers-style satire that the subdued nature made the profanity and increasingly awful scenarios funnier.

 As mentioned, Sandler’s music could be a culture shock for those who saw him as this lovable oaf. He could be edgy, but there was always the sense that he was letting you in on a joke. In this case, it was the magic of a rundown car, creating a picture so vulgar that you felt pity for him. Maybe the “white guy reggae” shtick he uses hasn’t dated well, but the substance is a whole different ball game. Like the up-beats in the melody, you can imagine the car running down the street, going under the speed limit by a negligent percentage. It’s so clunky that you immediately understand the sarcasm in Sandler’s carefree voice.

This isn’t an ode in the love song way, but one that reflects a struggle that we all have faced. The joke starts off simply enough:

Piece of shit car

I got a piece of shit car

That fuckin' pile of shit

Never gets me very far

Oh boy, here we go. What exactly makes Sandler’s car so awful? If you’ve had a car or know someone who passed by someone driving a car, you’ll know the limited capabilities of a car that’s not well maintained. For me, it’s often related to motor leaks or engine trouble. We think that the car will get us back and forth in one piece, but when it finally says goodbye, it brings with it a terrible pain. We have this hunk of junk to repair, sometimes costing a pretty penny that cuts out from other luxuries. 

That is the beauty of Sandler’s song. We think that our mechanical woes are terrible, usually only applying to one facet of the car. But no, this is going to be a car so terrible that setting it ablaze wouldn’t do it enough justice. This needs to be wiped off of the planet, erased from history. You need to get a Kickstarter going to get poor Sandler another car because he’s clearly suffering to the point that it begins to eat at his soul. He doesn’t have to use direct statements to get his frustration across. We all just know.

Sure, it can be argued that the song didn’t need to use so much profanity, but that’s part and parcel for what you get with Sandler. His albums were a source of finding clever ways to be as crude as possible. You can sense him laughing with his friends that he got away with releasing an album full of high school-level jokes because deep down, that is his mentality. Why else would he title this album “What the Hell Happened to Me?” It’s not a tale of self-awareness, but the fall into depravity.

That is why this song has a wonderful sense of absurdity. It’s just an excuse to put every possible scenario gone wrong into one long gag. You think that you got it bad? Well, listen to what he has to say:

It's got no CD player, it only got the 8-track

Whoever designed my car can lick my sweaty nut sack

They can bite his ass too

And I got no fuckin' brakes

I'm always way out of control

Eleven times a day I hear "Hey, watch it asshole"

What you’re experiencing is the perfect slow build, watching a man get into a worse situation with every line. The car is awful, yes, but it’s only when it becomes personal that things become funnier. It wouldn’t be funny to a grunge beat. It has to be this relaxing beat. After all, Marley wrote songs of peace, desiring the world to put down their arms and love each other. All that Sandler will make you do is want to grab a crowbar.

One of the greatest, most underrated details in the whole song is the back-up vocals, which startup like your traditional harmonies before they eventually turn on Sandler. After hearing about how he uses a rag for a gas cap, it’s diesel, ripped cushions, and no rearview mirror, he lands on one of the few details that he’s comfortable giving. He’s both too broke to buy something new, and doubts that he’ll ever attract a woman with his car, itself a symbol of luxury. 

The back-up singers become antagonistic with him at this point. As they sing “He never ever gets the pussy,” Sandler responds “Hey shut up.” The moment is brief, but it reflects growing insecurity under the song that you sense he’s barely holding himself together.

If there’s anything that this song resembles, it’s one of those ballads that men sing about women, going on in poetic detail about how great their beauty and charm is. Of course there’s the subgenre of songs about failed relationships that this is more in line with, but the subversion feels more in line with those songs about eternal flames.

In another context, it would sound like luck, but here it’s utter frustration, of entering Dante’s inferno and not being entirely convinced that you’ll get out. The song may be tiring for those who find the constant profanity off-putting, but it’s still a hilarious concept for a song. Given that Sandler was at his best when he was doing these novelty songs, “Ode to My Car” manages to transcend his crude nature and finds sincerity in frustration.

The only other thing that I can say about this song is that I am aware that back in the 1990s, Sandler toured behind his albums, often performing on college campuses. Seeing as I was seven at the time, I doubt that I would’ve ever been able to go. Still, there is some wonder in this man joining a crowd with these goofball songs that you hardly could believe were real. I imagine that they were something like the Undeclared episode, where people admired this man when all he did was paint familiar situations in the grossest ways imaginable.

Then again, that’s why Sandler getting to Oscar night may be the greatest joke he ever pulls on us. While Uncut Gems was worthy of some attention, you can see from his Spirit speech that he wasn’t going to fold. After all, this is the man who wrote songs about beat-up jalopies, creating the “Abbey Road” on the subject. Nobody was this straightforward about their anger to the point that you have to just laugh at some point, knowing that one of those things happened to you. While some are innocent, together they are all nightmares.

Considering his recent string of more charismatic hits, I do imagine that we’ll get closer to the day when the stars will align even straighter, and the neuroses that he’s been developing his whole career will be undeniable, creating something so cathartic that it rights hundreds of wrongs in the same way that Matthew McConaughey once did. I want to hear what his speech sounds like because you know it won’t be “quaint.” It will be a moment where you expect him to look out into a crowd, not of Teen Choice Awards voters, but of the prestigious and say “What the Hell Happened to Me?” and give a deeper poignancy to that album title. Until then, it’s interesting to see how far he’s come. Like that car, most didn’t expect him to get that far. Most still don’t, but then we get Uncut Gems and find that there’s a bit more gas in that tank.