Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and their Cars (review)

"Riding along in my automobile...cruisin' and playin' the radio with no particular place to go." That Chuck Berry song, along with tons of other rock tunes, provide one way to grasp youth culture. Amy Best does it with cars. Surely they aren't any more the royal road into youth culture than is popular music, but Best's choice is as good a one as any.

For 21st century American youth, or at least the 16-25 year olds in San Jose, California that Best studied, cars are overburdened with meaning. She employs a variety of methods beyond consulting a wide range of literature (she is weakest on the history of youth and claims incorrectly that youth culture in general is understood as oppositional), especially unstructured interviews and non-participant observations, mainly at two sites: the cruising scene and the high school auto shop. She describes how cars are locales for a variety of practices (like cruising and modifying for racing), but also tools, major consumer culture commodities, sites for a variety of practices, and symbols of key demographics and of freedom itself.

Given (sub)urban sprawl and the absence of mass transit alternatives, young people need cars to get to school, shopping and work. Parents are all too happy to have their 16 year olds get a driver's license so that they can relinquish their chauffeuring duties. Kenny works 40 hours a week, paying more than half of his earnings toward his car. "His car is his ticket to freedom, to mobility, his means to an end, his claim to visibility, to being a somebody and not a nobody invisible to the world around him," (136) Best concludes. Parents who supply (or help with financing) a car for their offspring get to negotiate driving privileges that often include saddling the young with driving siblings around and running household errands. Yet young peoples' desire for cars – boys especially – has little to do with practicality.

Ever since cars became part of youth culture in the post-WWII era, they have served as vehicles for escaping the parental gaze. Best sets most of her sights on two of the main spaces in which youth gather with cars - racing cars on the town's periphery and cruising down the main drag. Although both of these activities are illegal, at the end of the book in her discussion of the way in which youth are inserted in the commodity culture, Best seemingly ignores most of her research and concludes that "[y]outh car culture is not something youth themselves create apart from or necessarily in opposition to the dominant culture." (170)

Racing and cruising are rife with displays of gender and ethnicity; they are sites of youth identity. Referencing Baudrillard, Best underscores the car's "'identity value' in that they act as markers of social and cultural difference and thus communicate ideas about who we are in relation to who others are." (4)

One group of racers, offspring of Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese immigrants, use imported cars (from Asia) in preference to American muscle cars (used by Anglos). For them, "[s]peed, driver skill, and a willingness to take risks behind the wheel are what matter most... A slow car, no matter its appearance, provides little opportunity to demonstrate any of these virtues." (81) Although they "...distance themselves from feminine practices of paying too much attention to the body (car body or otherwise)..." (95), their masculinity is defined without reference to women.

In contrast, the gender identities of the mainly Mexican-Americans cruising with two to five kids, all male or all female, are invidiously displayed as they set their sights on seeing and being seen. "Having a cool car is the key to gaining visibility for boys in this culture," (63) Best states. She indicates that cool now means expensive vehicles outfitted with after-market parts. Women who cruise, or who stand around the main...