Monday, November 17, 2008

What To Listen To in Your Porsche

One of the things that I couldn't get over when I first moved to L.A. was the preponderance of Porsches around town. Growing up, one of my dream cars was a Porsche 911 Turbo Cabriolet. It's fast, semi-practical (22mpg Hwy), a convertible, it says "rich" without being extremely pretentious like a Bentley or Rolls Royce, and did I mention it's really fast? At home, I think I saw 3 of these on the road over the course of 8-10 years. I saw 3 within the first month I was in L.A. Here, every prick has a Porsche. Now I don't even get excited driving next to a Ferrari or Aston Martin or Rolls Royce or a Maserati.

Probably one of the best anecdotes was when I was briefly helping at an art auction a couple years ago. When I arrived, I asked one of the gallery associates sarcastically if she had had to help anyone put a piece of art into their Ferrari yet. A little later in the evening I helped carry a couple pieces of art out to a woman's car. We waited for the valet to bring the car around to the front of The Peninsula Hotel and I nearly laughed out loud when a Porsche 911 stopped in front of us. She strode toward the car, unlocked the doors, and proceeded to direct me how she wanted to go about fitting thousands of dollars worth of fine paintings into her cramped sports car.

But after you squeeze (possibly) priceless art into the $100,000+ automobile what type of music do you turn on. If it's a Rolls Royce and a Grey Poupon ad it has to be something Classical like Mozart. If it's an import tuner probably some sort of trance/techno/electronica, but I would suggest "Archangel" by Burial to go with your ground effects. If it's an Aston Martin it has to be an ode to it's British lineage (not its almost bankrupt owner Ford) like "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin. But if it's my Porsche, and people are already looking at me, and are truly concerned about what I'm listening to, I would want to educate my fellow drivers. I would want them to hear something that they're not hearing anyplace else. I like to dig deeper, and would want to find something to separate myself from the sea of Porsches. I was tipped to a fantastic album titled Rap Music (2007) by L.A.-based duo Brother Reade and would turn on "Work Ain't For Players" with one of my favorite lyrics ("next day, peep me in a '63 V8 / doin' 100 and some change on the PCH"). Alas, I don't have a Porsche and have to reevaluate what should be put into the personal Dream Car echelon.