1981: Journey Escape. 1989 the number, sound of the drummer, Chuck D yells. He might as well have spoken about 1981, the release of Journey’s Escape. Every Camelot shopping mall record store had the Escape poster up. Every AOR station played “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Journey was everywhere. And it was in my home as well. I had the cassette.

From Miami, Florida to Detroit, Michigan. The opening line of “Don’t Stop Believin’” (why can’t rock songs complete the ing) puts the singer in Detroit. Sometimes I’d think about that line when I’d walk around the city.

Just a city boy

Born and raised in south Detroit

He took the midnight train

Going anywhere

For a long time, I’ve wondered: where is this train he takes? The Michigan Central Train Station wasn’t closed by 1981, but was it running regular lines? How far could you travel from the MCS? And if he was born and raised in south Detroit, which part? Mexican Town? Indian Village? Corktown? Where is he now that he has left Detroit?

Location is everything, as they say. And whether this song is located in 1981 or at the conclusion of The Soprano’s finale, it speaks to the location of cliches, topoi we depend on to make sense of yearning, desire, and so-called dreams. “Some will win, some will lose.” Is there any lyric more cliche than this one? Put to a reggae beat, “Some will win, some will lose” could be a lyric from another musical cliche, Bob Marley. Marley, who died in Miami in 1981, has been transformed into cliche (”One Love”) by suburban kids who made Legends a best seller. I know. I was one of them. My high school biology teacher claimed to have played soccer with Marley at Miami Dade Community College. “Then we’d go in his van and smoke a lot of weed,” he’d say. From student to teacher. The cliches of suburban life circulate.
Marley, Journey, these are the cliches of popular culture. Should I stop believing? Should I get up and stand up for my rights? The elevation of one over the other is the emphasis of highbrow (Marley) over lowbrow (Journey). To say that is not to disregard the music, but it is to recognize how ideas, phrases, entities eventually circulate as cliches once they reach a certain saturation point. Cliche is nothing more than the elevation of an idea to a saturation point.

By 1981, Miami had reached its saturation point. Three years prior to the debut of Miami Vice, the city had lost its charm and quaintness (Coconut Grove Bed Races, South Beach surfer culture) for chic, speed, fashion, and celebrity. The beetle that busts out of the Escape egg on the record’s cover might as well be escaping that saturation. ’80s culture. Members Only. Vans. Reagan. Only. . . 1981 is the beginning of the ’80s. Escape was already on the culture’s mind. It was on mine as well. When I left Miami, I didn’t look back.

In the end, these liner notes are really notes about me. They are notes about escaping: autobiography, memoir, journal writing, blog posts. Maybe your term is: personal writing. The liner note offers a supplement to the thing purchased: in addition to the music, I get this comic, this commentary, this additional piece of information, this something that is not the music. The liner note may tell the story of the record or it may tell another story all together. Barthes may have found the liner notes the perfect addition to the autobiography: they are marginalia. In 1981, I may have been finishing sixth grade at F.C. Martin. All of the city’s suburban white kids were bussed into an African American neighborhood to attend a school that had only one grade: six. In 1981, I may have been listening to the first record I ever bought, The Blues Brothers soundtrack. In 1981, in Miami, Florida, I ran a timer on my stereo and tape deck to tape the late night show on WSHE (”She’s Only Rock and Roll”). I believed that radio stations secretly play “the good stuff” late at night when few people are listening. In 1981, I figured out that Journey was a super group assembled out of the pieces that once made up Santana, the Frank Zappa band, and the Steve Miller Band. In 1981, a cartoon movie called Heavy Metal was the most exotic thing I’d ever seen. Nudity, rock and roll, and cartoons all mixed as one. I taped it off of Showtime and watched it over and over. These are my marginalia; these are my liner notes. These are the reasons for writing about music. To line the music with myself. I am the reference of every image, as Barthes once wrote. I am the reference of every album.