You Might Think
"You Might Think" is a song by American rock band the Cars from their fifth studio album, Heartbeat City. The track was written by Ric Ocasek and produced by Mutt Lange and the Cars, with Ocasek also providing the lead vocals.
The song was released in February 1984, as the first single from Heartbeat City. "You Might Think" peaked at number seven in the United States and number eight in Canada. It also reached number one on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in the US, the band's first song to do so. In the United Kingdom, the song reached number 88.
Music video
The music video is one of the first to use computer graphics. The video features Ocasek and model Susan Gallagher in a series of quirky encounters. Ocasek appears in her bathroom mirror, inside a large periscope that pops up in her bathtub, in her mouth, as a fly, as King Kong on top of the Empire State Building and as the Robot Monster, among other incarnations. The rest of the band appears together and separately throughout the video; after they all appear in the movie-theater scene, keyboardist Greg Hawkes plays the dentist in the scene in which Ocasek is jackhammering a tooth in the girl's mouth. In the King Kong scene, the other three members, guitarist Elliot Easton, bassist Benjamin Orr and drummer David Robinson, are paired off in the two planes flying around Ocasek.An alternate video omits the ending where Ric Ocasek "removes" his face, a gush of water with various artifacts from the video streams out from where his face was, and the fly version of Ocasek flies into the screen and spatters green fly guts into the words "The End". Instead, in the alternate version, his face remains in place and he continues to lip-synch to the lyrics.
"You Might Think" won the first MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year and was nominated for five more awards at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards. The video also won five awards at Billboard 1984 Video Music Awards and four awards at the Videotape Production Association's 1985 Monitor Awards.
Robin Sloane of Elektra Records creative directed the video after director Jeff Stein showed her samples from New-York-based visual-effects company Charlex. The firm was nationally known for the innovative weekly advertisements that it was producing the National Enquirer. The commercials featured the first use of the Quantel Paintbox, the first tool for artists to use directly on the video screen. Stein, along with Charlex founders Alex Weil and Charlie Levi, directed and produced the video. Danny Rosenberg and Bill Weber served both as editors and video engineers, Kevin Jones was the lighting director, Danny Ducovny the cinematographer and Bob Ryzner the art director. The video cost $80,000 to produce, which was almost triple the average music-video budget of the time.
Track listings
- 7-inch single
- '''12-inch single'''
Credits and personnel
- Ric Ocasek – lead vocals, rhythm guitar
- Ben Orr – backing vocals, bass guitar
- Elliot Easton – lead guitar, backing vocals
- Greg Hawkes – keyboards, backing vocals, Fairlight CMI
- David Robinson – drums
- Mutt Lange – backing vocals
Charts
Weekly charts
| Chart | Peak position |
| US Rock Digital Song Sales | 16 |