The Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, and why it’s fun to stay at the YMCA: Motoramic Drives

Every masterpiece begins with a blank canvas. So it was for Jacques Morali. A French-born composer and music producer with a great affection for New York discotheques, Frére Jacques had a great beat, and you could dance to it, but he had no band, singer, or —lacking fluency in the language — English lyrics. Fortunately for him, and for American popular culture, he recruited some random local talent from the bars, Broadway choruses, and tunnel tollbooths (really!) of Gotham, and from these humble human materials, put together a group that could bring to life the music he heard in his head. His concept for this delightfully demented reverie also included costuming his performers in the full panoply of macho and mustachioed archetypes usually seen on muscular guys who are paid, after a brief period of gyrating, to take them off.

The resulting act, The Village People, went on to sell over 100 million albums worldwide, appear in a never-released commercial for the Navy filmed on a decommissioned destroyer, and provide Americans — often stealthily — with a delightfully campy inversion of gender normativity.

Which brings us to the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter.

The tall and extremely "European" looking van, which has been available in the US since 2001—though sometimes badged with Dodge or Freightliner logos, depending on the vagaries of Daimler's post-millennial purchase or divestment decisions—is rather unadorned and austere: an empty box on four wheels. Powered by Mercedes' venerated diesel, it's got a pulse, but not much more. As such, it acts as something of a white space, capable, with a bit of gussying up—a hydraulic lift here, a grey-water pump there—of assuming any number of identities. And while we have yet to see one costumed in Leatherman livery, a recent trip to Chicago at the behest of Three-Pointed Star found us wandering amongst an assortment of Sprinters seemingly outfitted to suit each of the other Village People—or someone's fantasy farrago of blue-collar stereotypes.