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.

Names and Things

108. J. GEILS BAND, "Centerfold"
Produced and written by Seth Justman
EMI America 8102 1981 Billboard: # 1

109. HOLE, "Celebrity Skin"
Produced by Michael Beinhorn; written by Billy Corgan, Eric Erlandson, & Courtney Love
DGC 1194 1998 Billboard: # 85

There's an old friend of mine from high school--let's call her "Nellie," because she played Nellie Forbush to my Emile de Becque back in the day--if you Google Nellie's real name, the first eight or so hits refer to a nude scene from a fairly well-known Hollywood film that was released around the time I knew her. She is nude in that movie, even in that scene, but the pictures that those webpages connect to her name are not pictures of her.

For someone of a younger generation, the idea that there could be nude photographs of a friend of mine up on the web must seem positively quaint. Gens X and Y have been snapping pics and videos of each other and posting them online with abandon now for at least a decade. That's one of the many things that makes J. Geils' "Centerfold" a real historical artifact: an era in which you could be surprised to encounter nude images of someone you knew in school seems so very long ago. We have all been so fully pornographied now that some people can actually be blase about it.

But Peter Wolf is not singing in this silly little single about someone who made private photos that suddenly became available to millions of people. He's singing--well, he's actually singing about himself (typical man), but the young woman whom he is remembering in this song presumably chose to allow a professional to take nude photographs of her, possibly as a stepping stone to a more varied career in the entertainment industry. That was the case with my old friend Nellie: the producers of that film she was in spotted her during a location shoot in Manhattan, asked her if she wanted to be in another scene, there was nudity involved, would she mind that, etc. As it turned out, she was in a second movie the following year, also shot in Manhattan, and this time she wore lingerie. Among us old theatre pals (who were not seeing much of her anymore at that point), the joke was that in her third movie she would be fully clothed. As far as I know, she was never in a third movie.

To hear Courtney Love sing about it, though, such decisions might actually be a viable career path--or maybe not. It feels as if Love is doing that chicken-hearted thing here of being autobiographically ironic by pretending her song is about someone else. Let's not kid ourselves, though: this song is most assuredly about her, even if the publication she was plagued by was probably not Celebrity Skin but Fox Mulder's favorite Celebrity Sleuth. In retrospect, it's clear now that the marketing of nude, semi-nude, or just plain titillating images of celebrities was only getting warmed up in the pre-Britney-Lindsay-and-Paris era when this single was released. I'm sure at the time Courtney thought that she had the whole situation under control. I'm using them, I bet she thought, they're not using me. If she chose to wear an outrageous outfit to get publicity, or to play Larry Flynt's mistress in order to advance her acting career, she was using people's image of her as a way of gaining wider currency for herself.

This seems like another one of those cases--and there are so many of them in pop--where the song in time proves so much wiser than the singer. Ten years on, I'm not sure I'd say that Courtney Love used the star-making machinery more than it used her. The popular image of Love today mostly casts her as the multiply addicted bimbo who married St. Kurt, while the fact is that she was responsible for at least one great rock and roll album (Live through This) and at least a half-dozen very thoughtful songs. That's no small achievement. Still, to a lot of people, she's little more than bright blonde hair, a ton of eye makeup, and a pair of prominently displayed breasts.

As Shakespeare's Mark Antony maybe should have said, the porn that women do lives long after them, but their art is oft interred with their plummeting CD sales. That's why I'm so glad that all those webpages got Nellie's real name wrong--no, that they got her name right and her body wrong. Because Nellie's body should belong to her. Images of it should not be out there for idiots to drool over. Like Courtney Love, the Nellie I knew was an artist, in this case a truly gifted comic actress. I hate thinking of her reduced to a tough answer in a porn trivia game.

MY ACADEMY

812. MISSION OF BURMA, "Academy Fight Song"
Produced by Richard Harte; written by Clint Conley
1981 Did not make pop charts

If you weren't alive (or paying attention) in the 1980s, you may not understand how important local scenes were back then--not just in their own right, but as slow feeders to a regionally pluralistic national music scene. Michael Azzerad deals with this obliquely in Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Gina Arnold much much better in Route 666: The Road to Nirvana, but both of them focus mostly on the local clubs. Far more interesting to me was local FM radio. In retrospect, the early 80s seems like a golden age (all golden ages exist in retrospect, of course), a highly fortunate moment in time that came after punk led to an explosion of small DIY bands but before FM radio became totally corporatized. Even after many FM stations were absorbed by corporate media conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity, there was still, for a little while, a commitment to local music: sponsoring local battles of the bands; doing long in-studio interviews with local artists; even playing nightly countdowns of the top 5 local singles. In our own era, when playlists are not only tightly controlled but set nationally rather than locally, such freedom and regional divergence seems unthinkable.

As you can tell from earlier entries, I spent the 80s in the Boston area. By the end of the decade the cool station was supposed to be WFNX, but the pioneer FM station in Boston was and would always be WBCN. They broadcast live from the Rat in Kenmore Square and promoted local bands so heavily that some touring rockers playing the Garden, Great Woods, or Foxboro would wonder why their opening acts were getting more applause than they were. The program director at BCN for most of these years was a guy who went by the name of Oedipus. He was one of the first djs outside of New York to realize how important the Ramones were going to be to the history of popular music--and if that doesn't establish his aesthetic cred, then there clearly is no hope for you.

My point is that, in the early 1980s, FM radio cultivated a kind of rock "provincialism." I'm using the word in the sense that the novelist Hamlin Garland used it in Crumbling Idols, a book of essays published almost a century before I ever set foot in the Rat. Very near the end of the nineteenth century, Garland saw the future of literature in the cultivation of local literary cultures that would in turn feed a national and even global redefinition of art. He saw Dostoyevsky as a Provincial artist, but he didn't think that meant that younger novelists like Stephen Crane should write like a Russian. They should write like themselves, about where they were. In seeing the larger world freshly through avowedly localized eyes, they would expand the vision of artists everywhere.

If I had to pick one band that exemplified the Boston scene in the early 1980s, it would be Mission of Burma. They played other cities, they've reformed and actually played Brooklyn earlier this year, but they never really broke anywhere except in Boston. "Academy Fight Song" was their first single, and it seemed primed to be embraced by soi-disant high school misfits everywhere, or maybe just people who never really outgrew the attitudes of high school. The sound of the single is sludgy and choppy, but even with the subject matter you'd never mistake it for a Dead Boys opus.

Which is my point actually. Maybe you had to be there, but to me this song sounds like Kenmore Square, even though the Rat's been torn down and there's a hotel there now, and even though I never actually saw MoB live. (I did see Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, one of the band's eventual splinters.) This single sounds like Boston in the early 80s, and you could never mistake Mission of Burma for a New York band, an Orange County band, a Minneapolis band, or a Cleveland band from that period, anymore than a jazz fan could confuse the sound of a purely Kansas City band from the 1930s with the Red Bank inflections that Count Basie added to the K.C. sound.

But then there's the two-way genius of provincialism: the local becomes the national, which feeds back into the local again, albeit in another locality. Bands from other scenes listened to MoB, even if their fans didn't in significant numbers, and they were in turn influenced what I may be alone in calling "the Boston sound." Most prominent among these was R.E.M., who of course eventually hit the big time. I'm willing to bet that at one point more people knew "Academy Fight Song" as a song R.E.M. played than as a song that Mission of Burma originated. Many may not have known it was a cover.

And I swear, sometimes when I listen to R.E.M., particularly when they're rocking rather than whining, I can hear Mission of Burma. I wonder if that makes Athens' favorite sons a Boston band.

I--Am Tired--of Your--Abuse!

792. BLACK FLAG, "Rise Above"
Produced by Black Flag; written by Greg Ginn
1981 Did not make pop charts

Who said there no protest songs in the 1980s? Okay, it's admittedly a pretty generalized protest song, more a voicing of general discontent than a focused, issue-oriented program for social change. But it's so peppy and energetic! And at this point in Black Flag's history, the band is still keeping frontman Henry Rollins in his pomo Ziggy Stardust place. It makes you want to go out and tell off your boss or parent--politely but firmly.