Our cable provider, Verizon FiOS, is pretty terrible. You know those car commercials where the volume is turned up to eleven so that some screaming salesman hack can tell you about great deals, so you can COME ON DOWN to their dealership and buy yourself a brand new, $8,000 Kia? Yeah, that's Verizon FiOS' specialty. It makes me miss Cablevision, the management strategies of the Dolan family, and their in-house propaganda, that's how bad it is.But one thing FiOS does have is Palladia HD, the all-concert channel that I end up enraptured with, every time I change the channel. Sometimes, as you may know, I am an insomniac, and falling asleep to a nice live concert is quite relaxing and enjoyable on those nights when I can't just get to sleep. On Monday night, I found a recent Journey concert from Manila on Palladia and couldn't help but watch for a while. And then I got angry.
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You see, I have a very warm place in my heart for Journey. It's not that Journey is fantastic (they're not even close to the best band I've ever listened to), but they were in the right place at the right time. When I was a teenager, I had a penchant for knowing how to use computers (wink wink), and I have a cousin (cousin Nick, who was a groomsman at my wedding, many of you know him) who was very much interested in the underground downloading of music. I also had a CD burner (which was rare in the late 1990's), and was able to burn a few CDs of 70's and 80's music for him from Napster. Or maybe it was Kazaa. But anyway, the point of this exercise was PROBABLY to get me exposed to music from Winger, Skid Row, Van Halen, Def Leppard, and Journey - my cousin also knew how to use a computer - but if that was the case, it worked doubly. He got his mix CD, and I started listening to the music that he appreciated the most.
And holy crap, was Journey amazing. I listened to it nonstop. Some teenagers have moments of understanding what music and life are all about when listening to Guns n' Roses (which I enjoyed) or nu-metal like Rammstein (I enjoyed this, too) - but my heart was with Journey. It was the perfect musical complement to my emotional state (vulnerable) combined with my levels of self-confidence (notably lacking) and quirkiness (exceedingly high). Later in high school, after I shed 40 pounds, I found a Journey's Greatest Hits CD in my AP computer science teacher's CD stack (because I was awesome in that way). I forced the class to listen to the CD each day while we failed at coding in C++ and still have this CD in my iTunes playlist, twelve years later. I still listen to Journey frequently, as it's followed me through college, work, grad school, and work again. "Be Good to Yourself," which is admittedly the twenty-seventh-best Journey song, made it onto my first "Running" iPod playlist when I was first getting into running half marathons. I have serious attachment problems when it comes to Journey.
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Some backstory about the band Journey may be appropriate here. The major thing that everyone knows about the band, besides "Don't Stop Believin'" (the twenty-eighth-best Journey song) is its lead singer, Steve Perry. He seems like a strange guy, amazing voice notwithstanding. After leaving Journey in the 1980s, he disappeared for almost a decade. Apparently he needed hip replacement surgery (why that requires a seven-year sabbatical from public life is beyond my level of understanding). He had some sort of solo career, which you'd know about if you liked terrible 80's music instead of awesome 80's music, like Journey. Now he shows up at San Francisco Giants baseball games and leads the singing of "Lights" during the seventh-inning stretch.
Anyway, for reasons I do not fully understand, he left the band around 1987 and they've rarely/never recorded together since. But, as my Monday night experience would attest, Journey is still actively touring and still playing their greatest hits from the 70s and 80s. Their newest lead singer is Arnel Pineda, who essentially performs an extended Steve Perry impression when the band performs live.
Listening to Journey perform live in the twenty-teens, I suppose it sounds "good" in the sense that the remaining four (original as far as we are concerned) members of the band are still fully capable of playing their respective instruments and putting on a good show. They seem genuinely invested in the propagation of late 1970's arena rock to the newest generation of Filipino audiences. It sounded like the fans really enjoyed themselves and to be perfectly honest, if someone gave me a ticket to see Journey play at the PNC Bank Arts Center this summer, I'd go in about 1.5 heartbeats.
My issue - what made me angry - was the lead singer. I get that lots of bands do this, and I think that Arnel Pineda did an excellent job of making Journey sound as much like Journey as possible without Steve Perry. He hopped around on stage like a man nearly twenty years younger than the rest of the band (which is accurate) and provided what the rest of the band probably thinks is a well-needed burst of energy.
I just don't get the replacement of a lead singer as seminal as Steve Perry. You don't replace Steve Perry (you can only hope to contain his spirit and singing voice long enough to do a decent job imitating him). What ended up happening at times during this concert was that Pineda (who was born in 1967 and was about twenty years old when the original incantation of Journey split), in those moments when he was supposed to maximally get into the music, sounded to me like what someone born in 1967 should do when singing a cover song from a legendary band from the 1980's while around his buddies at the neighborhood bar. By which I mean, karaoke it up and end up sounding just like Meat Loaf (in the worst way possible).
Which is fine at your neighborhood bar, and would impress me there, but here it made me angry.
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I do a terrible job of being a white kid born in 1983 raised in decidedly middle-class surroundings in New Jersey. I should love the band Sublime, but I have to admit, I don't. Everyone has that one band that they know they SHOULD love, but they don't, and for me, it's Sublime. I love Journey instead.
I suppose Sublime and Journey couldn't be more different. Sublime's original lead singer, Bradley Nowell, died in 1996 of a heroin overdose. Steve Perry only died metaphorically. Anyway, I never liked (almost everything) Sublime did. I tried listening to their self-titled album many times over the years. I didn't even like it when I was 21, the age when you're supposed to like everything you listen to, good or bad. "Wrong Way" seemed stupid. "Santeria" was okay, but kind of droning. "What I Got" was only pleasant for that line about being ambivalent toward one's mother's use of cannabis, and "Caress Me Down" was pornographic and violates my conservative morals. The only Sublime song I ever unilaterally liked was "April 26 (28), 1992", because it centered around the most idyllic riot in the history of mankind - it was essentially a fantasy novel set to a reggae bass beat.
When Nowell died, the band's manager said that Sublime like him would be like Nirvana without Kurt Cobain - it simply wouldn't continue. Of course, we all recently saw Paul McCartney admirably substitute for Cobain at the Concert for Sandy Relief last month, so we know that in the world of music, no bets are completely off. And Sublime, too, couldn't let the death of their lead singer keep them from recording new material.
I'm the only person in the world (maybe) who prefers the newest iteration of Sublime (with lead singer Rome Ramirez) over the older version. It could be because I'm now older, or it could be because the music is now less edgy, but it's almost as if my interests in music and Sublime's have merged somewhere in between where we were in 1996. Every time I catch a Sublime with Rome song on XM Faction, I don't change the radio. I always end up enjoying it.
It also helps, of course, that Sublime with Rome made a concerted effort to record new material (which, at least to me, sounds substantively different from the music created with Nowell, both in terms of lyrical content and musical tonality). Journey apparently recorded a new album with Pineda, but I heard none of it while listening to that concert on Monday night, so it's clear to me that they are not terribly interested in supporting their newest effort. Instead, they are content to play out the string, in essence, substituting the heart and soul of the band's sound but playing the same old tunes that made the band famous. Perhaps it's to make a quick buck, perhaps it's because they genuinely love what they created back in the day and don't want to disrespect it by letting it go.
Either way, well-intentioned or bad, it's just not the same, and it makes me wish they'd just let the music die. It's just fine in "Greatest Hits" format, and it's not like anyone listens to Journey for the deep tracks anyway. Give me my new Sublime with Rome, any day of the week.
