I Stopped Believin’

Journey's "Don't Stop Believin’" is an example of the longevity of mediocrity. I was once a young tweenager who loved Journey, but I outgrew them. I had Escape on cassette, and when I was in 8th grade chorus, "Open Arms" was one of the songs we sang at PTA meetings and nursing homes. Yeah, serious rock ‘n roll it is not.

Let’s start with the nonsensical lyrics. One would think that with three lyricists (Schon, Cain, and Perry), at least one of them would have known that there is no South Detroit. It doesn’t exist, unless you want to count Windsor, Ontario as Detroit’s southside. In term of meter, “Canada” and “South Detroit” are both dactyls, and can easily be interchanged without affecting the rhythm of the line. And Canada exists, so there’s that.

Let’s look at the entire first verse.

“Just a small town girl
Livin' in a lonely world
She took the midnight train going anywhere
Just a city boy
Born and raised in South Detroit
He took the midnight train going anywhere” (Schon, Cain, Perry, 1981)

So we open with a “small town girl” and a “city boy” from a nonexistent place. Hmmm, I’m not familiar with any small towns that have a passenger train, much less a midnight one. Once I get past that hurdle, there’s the problem of the trains’ destination: anywhere. You cannot buy a ticket to anywhere, nor is there some mystical locomotive that runs at midnight from, apparently, everywhere to anywhere. My willing suspension of disbelief just isn’t willing enough for me to accept the first verse of this song.

The structure is also problematic for me. This song opens with two verses. The first verse has six lines, the second has four, and they’re followed by a two-verse refrain, three lines each. That’s followed by two four-line verses, then the two-verse refrain again, followed by a third refrain of three lines, three times, dropping “to that feeling” from the middle “Hold on” line the first time it’s repeated.

The two-verse refrain:

Strangers waitin'
Up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searchin' in the night

Streetlights, people
Livin' just to find emotion
Hidin' somewhere in the night (Schon, Cain, Perry, 1981)

I can accept strangers, and I can accept them waiting on the boulevard more easily than up and down it. I have a further problem with shadows in the night (light being a bit of a prereq for shadows), compounded by the assertion that the shadows are “searchin’.” Perhaps South Detroit is what they’re seeking.

The second verse of the refrain is what grieves me the most. Anthropomorphizing streetlights is too much of a stretch for me, especially streetlights “livin’ just to find emotion/Hidin’ somewhere in the night” (Schon, Cain, Perry, 1981). I’m not quite certain who or what is hiding. Is emotion hiding? That seems unlikely. Streetlights hiding makes even less sense than that. Shadows are searching and emotion is hiding if we look at the entire first refrain. That’s one odd game of hide and seek that doesn’t seem likely to produce a winner. I visualize emotion running for home base (presumably South Detroit), pursued by shadows. Doesn’t quite work for me.

The final verses are card-carrying cliché-ridden charlatans of authority, telling us things we’ve been told umpty-million times. Yawn.

That’s a deep enough dive into lyrics not worthy of a deep dive, so let’s move on to the generations of fans of this song who can’t hit the damn notes, yet belt it out at top decibel, torturing everyone within earshot. The assault on the musical scale from fans of this song should be a felony. The more people singing it, the worse it is. One might think that multiple voices would find harmony in this power ballad (a cringeworthy term, in and of itself), but one would be woefully mistaken. Multiple voices hitting the wrong notes in the groupsings of this song are so off-key and jarring to the ear that I won’t sully the word cacophony with it. Cacophony is more pleasing to the ear than a bunch of drunken twentysomethings belting out the refrains of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

I understand that many love this song, but for the life of me, I can’t understand why. I would much rather listen to Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together and Grooving in a Pict” than virtually any Journey song.

Perhaps you’re one of the enthusiasts of this song, and perhaps you’re offended by my disdain of it, but while you’re playing hide and seek with lampposts and feelings, I’ll be where the streets have no name, listening to good music instead of this overplayed, nonsensical assault on my intelligence and ears. Oh, Sherry, I stopped believin’ many, many moons ago.

Perry, S., Schon, N., & Cain, J. (1981). Don’t stop believin’ [Song]. On Escape. Columbia Records.