The Stupid Little Song That Would Not Die

222. JOURNEY, "Don't Stop Believin'"

Written by Jonathan Cain, Steve Perry, and Neal Schon; produced by Kevin Elson and Mike "Clay" Stone

Columbia 02567 1981 Billboard #: 9

Confession # 1: I don't really like this song--never have, never will. To tell you the truth, I've never really liked Journey. If you put a gun to my head and said I had to listen to one of their songs, I would probably pick "Only the Young," but that's mostly because it's on the Vision Quest soundtrack. I wouldn't pick this this song, though, not in a million years. As I recall, I half-detested two or three decades ago.

Confession # 2: This song wasn't on the list for this project originally. There are 1001 slots, but I've only really mapped out 700-800 of them. I wanted to leave room for music that was released while I was working on it, as well as songs that I suddenly realized I needed to fill out my argument.

"Don't Stop Believin'" definitely falls under that latter category. It is the Stupid Little Song That Would Not Die. Released in 1981, coming as the metal lite of Aerosmith et al became even liter and slipped irrevocably into the reign of the hair bands, this song and Journey passed almost immediately into the land of Dad Rock. It wasn't really a hit or the summation of an era. It was just one of those songs that was Around.

Then in 2007, we got this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnT7nYbCSvM

Two years later, we got this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_DQ6FAdmEA

A few months after that, we got this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4THvv-i4vqs

Then a couple of weeks ago, we got this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laaU5I0xUmk

As I said, the stupid little song just won't die. Somehow, it seems of immense significance to our culture. Why it won't die is an interesting question, one that brings us back, as always, to Frank.

It is, as you will recall, Frank's World. (We just live in it--I have a button that says so.) Back in the 1950s, both Frank and Ella were engaged in an interesting bit of musical archeology, unearthing songs from before the Second World War and rerecording them, and in the act of doing so creating what is now rather pompously called The Great American Songbook. Ella, as always, took the high road, following in the steps of Lee Wiley and recording albums for Verve that were devoted to Cole Porter, George Gershwin, et al. Frank recorded songs by those people too, of course, but he also unearthed a great many Stupid Little Songs of the 1920s, songs like "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me" and "Makin' Whoopee" that lack the clever construction of a truly great pop song like "I've Got You Under My Skin" and are simply fun to sing.

In other words, Frank recorded the Grandfathers of Stupid Little Songs like "Don't Stop Believin'," and in his performances these songs inevitably sound better than the originals. As I commented on in my post on Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt," after Dylan and the Beatles we think of pop songs as belonging to particular performers, which wasn't the case during the swing era. In post-1970 pop, a cover is somehow cheesy, a B-side at best and karaoke at worst. The importance of Stupid Little Songs, though, is that they are not irrevocably owned by the people who wrote them. They leave something for the performer and audience to do, which is why they ultimately work better in karaoke--and Glee, for that matter, which is a post-karaoke musical--than very well written songs do.

Am I saying Journey wrote a page in the Great Neo-American Songbook? Not as much as Trent Reznor or Prince (whom on a good day I might call my generation's Cole Porter). But they did write the kind of song that an internet-era Frank Sinatra could kill on. Stupid Little Songs can still spawn great, goofy performances.