PERSONAL ESSAYS

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I used to be afraid that if I told people the truth about my feelings for Journey, they wouldn't like me anymore. My arena-rock-wanker roots would reveal themselves. My head would suddenly morph into my tenth-grade yearbook photo: the flipped hair, heavy eyeshadow, the over-plucked brows. I'd be wearing my Journey concert jersey with my nickname spelled out in felt (Baby Egg) across my shoulder blades, my brother (Egg) idling nearby in his silver Le Mans, a marijuana fog awaiting me in the back seat, because nobody put Baby Egg in the front.
    But my admission is usually followed by the passionate response of, "Oh my God, I love Journey, too!" Everybody says they love Journey. It's become cool to love Journey, which is something I hate more than frickin' trucker hats.
    When people tell me they love Journey, two things happen. First, I begin mentally calculating their age. Then I categorize them as either loving Journey authentically, or loving them ironically. If they're older than, say, thirty-three, I figure that at worst their love for Journey is tinged with nostalgia. Like me, they have memories of singing "Don't Stop Believin'" into a hairbrush, slow dancing to "Open Arms" with the shortest guy in class, or slapping the dash to "Any Way You Want It." (Note: I am not talking about Journey's '70s, post-Santana, prog-rock era. I'm talking about the power ballads of the mid-'80s. Write your own essay about the time Prince almost joined Journey. But quit crying about it. Prince did all right.)

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    If the Journey lovers are under thirty-three, they probably love Journey ironically. They've never been to a concert, never roller-skated backwards under a disco ball to "Who's Cryin' Now," and never heard Steve Perry himself — and not the band's ersatz current singer — bounce his operatic voice off the rafters at Cobo Hall. It's not their fault. To quote the hippies, they just weren't there. They were too young or just into punk, to which I say, whatev. Journey was the soundtrack to some really beautiful times, on the surface. Disco was over, the recession had come to an end, people were getting really rich really fast. Music's response was arena rock: big, bold and beautifully distracting (okay, and artificially corporate to the savvy). At the time, I was simply a stupid, dazzled wanker looking at all the shiny concert lights and staring into the symmetrical gorgeousness of all my Journey record covers. And I miss those times, when I was young and naïve enough for music like that to speak to me.
    The late '70s and '80s were all about arena rock, reaching an apex, I would suggest, in 1983, the year on most concert stubs I've saved:

The images in "Don't Stop Believin'" are almost like an Edward Hopper painting: you can't help but see a small-town girl, living in a lonely world.

Journey, Aerosmith, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Foreigner, ELO, Supertramp, Queen, REO Speedwagon and Styx, to name a few. I saw them all in downtown Detroit, a city from which a million people fled after two decades of racial unrest. Although downtown Detroit looked like Beirut in those days, it was white wanker heaven in the summer. After a concert, we'd hit the Gold Dollar or Skippers in Cass Corridor or get a hot dog at Lafayette's Coney Island. Dunking our thumbs in our beers to soothe second-degree lighter burns, we were completely unaware of our heartbreaking surroundings and the politics that created that blight.
    But I still love Journey. In the age of irony, this love is complicated. Ironists forget, or simply don't know, that Journey was doing something most bands don't attempt nowadays. They were trying to be beautiful — from the colorful cover art to the carefully choreographed concerts to the music itself: soaring, orchestral and unabashedly Broadway-descriptive in its lyrics. The images in "Don't Stop Believin'" are almost like an Edward Hopper painting. You can't help but see a small-town girl, living in a lonely world, on a midnight going anywhere. By the time the song amps it up and introduces streetlights and people, you know the city boy, born and raised in South Detroit, will meet that small-town girl and all will be well. It's beautiful in its simplicity, the exact way a beach is at sunset, or how Julie Christie was when she was young — unironically, uncomplicatedly beautiful.
    Ironic beauty doesn't do it for me in music. The Darkness, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the White Stripes, I like them okay. But they're probably not bands I'll play in twenty years, because they're trying to sound like they're trying not to be beautiful, and it doesn't touch me. In every album after Bedtime Stories, Madonna has relied almost entirely on ironic beauty to sell her music. When she's not being painfully literal about her politics and spirituality, she is only ironic, as though each song is saying, "Remember when we used to think this was so great?" That's why I'm getting off Cher's back, because Cher still tries to sing beautifully. (She doesn't, but the point is she tries. She booms and struts and loves up those songs, and beyond the drag-queen camp of her between-set banter, each song remains unalloyed and unironic. I feel the sadness in the song "Half-Breed," the lament in "If I Could Turn Back Time" — although I have to force that lamentable Fleet Week video from my brain.)
    I wonder if it's coincidence that, these days, most bands making unironically beautiful music happen to be Canadian. (I also wonder if I say that because I'm Canadian.) But even after repeated listenings, I'm still not tired of The Arcade Fire, Broken

The greatest enemy of unironically beautiful music has to be karaoke.

Social Scene, Wolf Parade, The Stars and the songs of Kathleen Edwards (our modern Olivia Newton-John?). Each has a sound that feels both new and old, and each came to fame during an era in Canadian politics that was decidedly beautiful: gay marriage was legalized, pot seemed on the cusp of becoming totally decriminalized, the economy was steady, we said no to the Iraq war and yes to American soldiers who fled here. But as Canada's new Conservative government seems poised to chip away at all those beloved liberal gains, I wonder whether the next stage of Canadian music will be a kind of grunge redux, if we'll see a faux-uglified influx of neo-Pearl Jam and Nirvana-type bands.
    But the greatest enemy of unironically beautiful music has to be karaoke. It's no coincidence that people tend to pick beautiful songs from bands and artists who weren't being ironic when they wrote them. I can kind of get down with a drunk couple belting out "Cold As Ice." When the crowd sways back and forth while some skinny guy writhes around onstage near the end of "Purple Rain," I'll go along with that. I dig a chick who acts like Sandy when she sings "Hopelessly Devoted." But when I watch someone punch the air to the beat of Journey's "Anyway You Want It," I want to cry. Because while I've always liked ONJ, Foreigner and Prince — Journey, I love. They remind me of the days when I was young and stupid, when music didn't mean much beyond how it simply made me feel. And even though I could stand accused of being a sodden nostalgist, and a snob about a band many would say doesn't matter, Journey's music remains beautiful to me. Because those songs still tickle the innocent part of my heart that once required a whole arena to contain it.

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