Timely truths

Little as I cared for her album of covers with Bill Frisell, I have to admit that Petra Haden's cover of "Don't Stop Believin'" has its quantum of worth—or at least the combination of her cover and that video does.  Who could resist that tale of a fried egg and a calculator?  And then there's the singer's emoting.  But a wee bit from the pitchfork review of the album on which it appears is irksome: "The Sopranos" may have forever lifted [the Journey song] out of a cheeseball ghetto it never deserved, begins some sentence or other (in fact a very definite sentence, the one that so begins).  What's with that "it never deserved"?

Presumably this is just another instance of the way that aesthetic claims take universal form, though one could make a similar claim about desert involving, to use a paragon example of a subject of nonaesthetic claims, dessert.  Apple pie never deserved to languish in obscurity the way it did in the 80s.  (I was going to say The simple pleasures of apple pie …, but that starts to sound like an aesthetic claim.)  The preceding doesn't sounds as obviously weird as a claim like "vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate ice cream" made not just as an expression of the utterer's opinion but as something supposed to hold tout court.  But that's probably neither here nor there; the point is that the idea that aesthetic claims are intended universally is familiar, and this does seem to be an aesthetic claim.  Of course if we now come to see that the song doesn't belong in a cheeseball ghetto, the people who say otherwise are wrong, regardless of when or in what circumstances they said it.  Challenge Stephen M. Deusner, author of the review, as to his assessment of the Journey song, and he's likely to adduce several actual properties of the song in his defence.  (Of course it could have the claimed good properties and be utterly cheeseball, so there's the possibility that SMD and his hypothetical challenger would be talking at cross-purposes, but we'll ignore that.)

Now certain features, whether non* or perceptual, will be salient to different audiences, and presumably we can generalize this to what's likely to be salient at different times.  (Some of the nonperceptual properties may not even exist at the time some one audience observes it—think of Borges on predecessors, for example, in an essay whose title I have misplaced in my memory.)  For various stylistic reasons what makes one work stand out may go utterly unremarked, and relative to the audience in fact be utterly unremarkable, for some periods of time or other.   So if the reasons that the Journey song is good (and never was bad) have to do with such properties, then at the very least we oughtn't fault those who came before for not having recognized its quality.  And we should be more cautious about saying that it never was a mass of cheese.  Even if it's now thought to be quality, or at least acceptable, or whatever, why should we insist that all along that's how it was? Perhaps its condemnation as cheese was right for a time, and now the time's passed.

* NB I haven't actually read this article, but I did read a different article in the BJA that referred to it, so that kind of counts?

Comments

[Kara]

Would you like to guest-lecture during the Journey/Hall&Oates/Survivor unit I have planned for my college composition class? I already have some eager karaoke singers lined up for the musical portion. Bear in mind, of course, that you're going to have to dumb it down a little. Something along the lines of, "Journey: Sucks? Not sucks? Can anyone tell me when the 80s were?"

[ben wolfson]

Not if it involves transporting my ass to San Jose I don't.

[Richard]

Naturally, Deusner fails to take into account the possibility that the effect of the use of the song in the Sopranos finale RELIES on its essential (perceived) cheesiness.

Which is to say, it did deserve to be so consigned to the cheeseball ghetto and has not now been lifted out of it. Or something.

[Dr Paisley]

All Journey belongs in a ghetto, preferably one in Philadephia that is burned down, not by the police, but by people who grasp the difference between music and crap.

The ashes derived therefrom should then be used to smother everyone associated with Van Halen, unto the third generatin thereof.