1984 · Behind the Songs
The lead single from Heartbeat City paired Mutt Lange’s pristine production with a groundbreaking computer-animated video — and won Video of the Year at the very first MTV Video Music Awards.
By 1984, The Cars were at a crossroads. Six years after their debut, they had conquered American radio but had yet to fully conquer the new medium that was reshaping pop: music video. “You Might Think,” the lead single from their fifth album Heartbeat City, changed that in spectacular fashion. The song itself was classic Cars — Ric Ocasek’s arch lyric about romantic obsession set to a sleek, keyboard-driven groove — but the video was something no one had seen before: a mini-movie built with pioneering computer animation, starring a digitized Ric Ocasek pursuing a woman through a series of surreal, cartoonish scenarios. When MTV held its first Video Music Awards that September, “You Might Think” won Video of the Year, beating Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
The song came from the Heartbeat City sessions, where the band worked with producer Mutt Lange, the perfectionist behind Def Leppard’s blockbusters. Lange pushed The Cars toward a bigger, glossier sound — layer upon layer of keyboards, guitars, and backing vocals, all polished to a high shine. Ocasek, who had always favored a certain detachment in his writing, found the new production suited his latest obsession: a lyric about a man so infatuated that he cannot tell where admiration ends and delusion begins. “You might think I’m crazy,” the narrator admits, and the song never quite decides whether he is.
What made “You Might Think” a hit was the tension between its bright surface and its uneasy heart. The music is irresistible — a bouncy synth riff, a chorus that lodges in the brain after one listen, Benjamin Orr’s smooth backing vocals softening Ocasek’s deadpan lead. But the lyric is pure Ocasek: wry, slightly creepy, and entirely self-aware. The narrator knows he is too much. He catalogs his own obsessive behavior with a shrug, as if to say, this is just how it is. It is a love song for the stalked as much as the smitten, and its ambiguity is what keeps it interesting decades later.
The video, directed by Jeff Stein, was the real breakthrough. Using early computer graphics — wireframe animation, digital compositing, effects that look charmingly primitive today — it turned Ocasek into a cartoon lothario, morphing through a fly, a samurai, and a series of other absurd avatars in pursuit of a beautiful woman played by model Susan Gallagher. The clip cost a fortune by 1984 standards and took weeks to render on the primitive hardware of the time. But the gamble paid off: it was like nothing else on MTV, and it made The Cars, a band of thirty-somethings with an arch sensibility, into video stars.
Winning the First VMA
The first MTV Video Music Awards, held on September 14, 1984, at Radio City Music Hall, were a coronation for the new medium. Madonna performed “Like a Virgin” in a wedding dress. The Police won multiple awards. And when the envelope for Video of the Year was opened, the winner was not “Thriller” — the most famous video ever made — but “You Might Think.” The upset stunned the industry and validated MTV’s willingness to reward innovation over sheer scale. The Cars, who had always been slightly outside the mainstream, were suddenly at its center.
Commercially, the song was a major hit, climbing into the Top 10 and giving Heartbeat City the strong launch it needed. The album would go on to spawn another Top 20 single in “Magic” and cement the band’s second act. But “You Might Think” did something more lasting: it proved that The Cars could evolve. The sleek, keyboard-heavy sound of Heartbeat City was a departure from the guitar-driven new wave of their debut, and Lange’s production gave them a contemporary sheen that kept them relevant in the mid-eighties.
Greg Hawkes’ keyboard work is the song’s secret weapon. Where earlier Cars hits had balanced guitars and synths, “You Might Think” leans decisively toward the electronic, with Hawkes’ bright, stabbing chords driving the track. It was a sign of the times — 1984 was the year the synthesizer truly conquered pop — but Hawkes, a classically trained musician with a love for new technology, made the machines sound playful rather than cold. His parts give the song its bounce, its nervous energy, its sense of a mind racing.
The lyric’s exploration of obsession feels more relevant with each passing year. In an era of social media stalking and parasocial relationships, Ocasek’s portrait of a man who cannot let go — who interprets every glance as encouragement — reads as uncomfortably prescient. But the song never moralizes. It simply observes, with Ocasek’s characteristic half-smile, the gap between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. You might think he’s crazy. He might think he’s in love. The song lets both readings stand.
Today, “You Might Think” endures as both a great pop single and a landmark in video history. The computer animation that seemed so futuristic in 1984 now looks quaint, but the ambition behind it — the willingness to try something no one had tried — still impresses. And the song itself, with its perfect chorus and perfectly queasy lyric, remains the quintessential Cars paradox: music you can dance to, about a feeling you probably should not trust.