Inexhaustible Icon
GM Has Left Its Brand on the Cultural Landscape
By Paul Farhi, Washington Post Staff Writer
No company — or at least no company’s products — has been as celebrated in American popular culture as General Motors. For generations, GM vehicles have inspired artistic metaphors of freedom, speed, 
youth, romance, power, sex. As a billboard in Chevrolet’s home town of Warren, Mich., once succinctly put it, “No one writes songs about Volvos.”
Heroes (and admirable anti-heroes), for example, tend to drive muscle cars. Burt Reynolds telegraphed his good ol’ boy bona fides by driving a hell-raisin’ black Pontiac Trans Am (with gold firebird hood decal) in the “Smokey and the Bandit” movies. A few years later, a high-tech version of the same muscle car conveyed crusading crime-fighter Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff) to the scene in “Knight Rider.” The Trans Am’s cousin, the Chevrolet Camaro, got the nod in the 2007 blockbuster “Transformers.” In the 1960s TV series “Route 66” — about the romantic and adventurous possibilities of the open road — the two young protagonists took to the highway in an iconic Corvette convertible.
Rock music has been inseparable from cars since rock-and-roll’s embryonic days. Some pop historians credit “Rocket 88” — written by Ike Turner in 1951 as an ode to GM’s powerful Oldsmobile Model 88 — as the first recording of the rock era.