In Defense Of Schlock Music: Why We Love/Hate It

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Here & Now

In Defense Of Schlock Music: Why We Love/Hate It
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http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/08/27/r ... ck-defense


Steve Perry was lead singer of Journey during its most successful periods, including the song “Don’t Stop Believin’.” He’s pictured here onstage in New York in 1979. (Ebet Roberts/Redferns)

Music critic Jody Rosen defends the kind of over-the-top, sentimental songs that Journey, Lionel Richie, Billy Joel and Prince made famous. He talks to Here & Now’s Robin Young about how the tendency towards schlock goes way back in American popular music.

Recent Pieces By Jody Rosen:
Why Journey, Billy Joel, and Lionel Richie Are Better Than You Think
From Journey to Beyoncé: The 150 Greatest Schlock Songs Ever

[tater1977]

5/27/2014 at 6:30 AM

In Defense of Schlock Music: Why Journey, Billy Joel, and Lionel Richie Are Better Than You Think
By Jody Rosen

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http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/jody-ros ... music.html


When Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” first rumbled into earshot in the summer of 1981, few presumed it would have much staying power. The song was a hit, but not a huge one, reaching No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 19 and hanging on at that position for two weeks before tumbling down the charts and off radio playlists. There was no sign of “Don’t Stop Believin’” in the tallies of the year’s top-100 hits in either the U.S. or U.K. It was a curio, memorable mainly for its unorthodox structure, serving up three verses and two bridges before finally arriving at its money-shot chorus (“Don’t stop believin’/Hold onto that feelin’”) at the 3:23 mark.


The rock-critic consensus on “Don’t Stop Believin’” was unsurprising: Disdain was the order of the day. Critical conventional wisdom cast Journey as doubly deplorable. They were not merely (to use the period’s choice epithet) “corporate rockers”; they were cynical corporate rockers — erstwhile San Francisco hippies who had shelved their prog-fusion ambitions and hired a cornball singer, Steve Perry, to chase Foreigner and REO Speedwagon up the pop charts. For critics, Journey was like a one of those moldering foodstuffs that you dread finding in the back of your refrigerator: When forced to deal with it, you take bacon tongs in hand, hold it at arm’s length, and drop it into the trash. In a 166-word blurb in the 1983 edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, Dave Marsh, the Bruce Springsteen biographer and guardian of rock-critical orthodoxy, gave one-star reviews to all of Journey’s albums while emptying his rucksack of insults: “Stepford Wives rock,” “calculated,” “nitwit,” “plodding,” “banality,” “utter triviality,” “exploitative cynicism,” and worst of all, surely, by Marsh’s lights, “Paul Anka and Pat Boone.” Rolling Stone’s regular magazine review of Escape, the album that opened with “Don’t Stop Believin’,” was no kinder. Critic Deborah Frost’s contempt boiled over into mixed metaphors (“a veritable march of the well-versed schmaltz stirrers”), with special scorn aimed at the lyrics of “Don’t Stop Believin’”: “Lord knows how many weary pilgrims have managed to tramp down the memory lane of adolescent lust without the side trip that Journey make to the dank hole of dreck-ola … addressing their audience as ‘streetlight people.’” Frost wrapped up her piece with a vision of Journey’s obsolescence: “Maybe there really are a lot of ‘streetlight people’ out there. If so, my guess is that they’ll soon glow out of it.”


The truth, we’ve learned, is stranger than fiction, to say nothing of Rolling Stone album reviews. “Don’t Stop Believin’” hasn’t just stuck around: It has sunk its teeth into the collective unconscious. Today, the song sounds irrefutable; its dramatic slow-boiling arrangement — the tolling piano chords, arcing 16th-note guitar riffing, and mock-operatic vocals — is the essence of arena-rock grandeur. As for schmaltz-stirring: The song’s inspirational bromides, its images of desperadoes stalking noirish streets on a quest for hidden, um, emotion — “Streetlight people/Livin’ just to find emotion/Hiding somewhere in the night” — these sentiments have proved alluring enough to pull in just about everyone: cutesy indie-pop a cappella singers; the Chicago White Sox, who embraced “Don’t Stop Believin’” as the theme song of their 2005 championship run; David Chase, who used it as the soundtrack for The Sopranos’ final scene; Ryan Murphy, who made it the big finale of Glee’s pilot episode; Kanye West, whose live band played a note-for-note rendition in tribute to the rapper’s late mother; even Bruce Springsteen, who romped through a shaggy cover alongside Lady Gaga, Sting, Elton John, and other stars at a 2010 Carnegie Hall benefit concert.

In short, 33 years after its release, “Don’t Stop Believin’” is pop-music Holy Writ. History has certainly been kinder to Journey than to the reviewers who savaged them. If you examine the top singles in the 1981 Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, you’ll find Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” in the No. 1 slot. “Don’t Stop Believin’” got nowhere near that list, of course, yet today Journey’s anthem haunts our culture like no other song from 1981. “Don’t Stop Believin’” has become a standard not in spite of the qualities that repelled critics — the clichés, the pretensions, the overweening emotionalism, Steve Perry’s too-tight jeans and too-tremulous tenor. It has become a standard because of them. Put another way, “Don’t Stop Believin’” has endured because it belongs to a tradition that has given us our most indestructible songs, a tradition as time-honored, as sturdy, as it is maligned: schlock.