This month's issue of Mix magazine's interesting Classic Tracks feature is on the making of "Don't Stop Believin." Very interesting, whether you're a fan or not.

Geez, is there anything more tiresome than the "your favorite band sucks" discussion? Why can't people accept that saying something like "Journey sucks" or "Journey rocks" is only an opinion, not something that can be proven true or false?

Me, I find the music snobs very tiresome. A typical one would probably find a few discs to admire in my collection - and a lot to sneer at. So what? As Duke Ellington said, if it sounds good, it IS good? And "sounds good" is a matter of personal taste.

I hated Journey when I was coming of age in the '80s, but occasionally I'd hear one of their songs on the radio and be surprised how good it sounded. This despite the fact that my tastes stayed pretty current up until about when the critics declared "grunge was dead."

People can say Journey sucks all they want, but Journey's Greatest Hits gets frequent play in my home. I find some of Journey's output syruppy and sythetic. But anyone who likes guitar-based maintstream really shouldn't be able to listen to a song like "Stone In Love" and say that it sucks.

"Don't Stop Believin'" is not a Journey favorite of mine, but I consider "Stone In Love" "The Lights" (what some in this thread called "When the Lights Go Down in the City"), "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'" "Wheel in the Sky" and "Chain Reaction" to be classics.

It’s one thing to say that Steve “The Voice” (barf) Perry was inspired by Sam Cooke – that’s all well and good – but to claim that Steve is the inheritor of Sam’s mantle or even remotely close to being the talent that Sam was... well, that’s just plain idiotic.

There are rockers who have ‘done Sam’ well. Rod Stewart, for instance, has at times been worthy of touching the hem of Cooke’s garment. But Steve? Only in some bizarro-cheesy-pouf universe.

Steve Perry bears the same relationship to Sam Cooke that Michael Bolton does to Otis Redding, while coincidentally wearing an equally ridiculous and iconic coif. So yeah, as a singer he's a pretty good Bad Hair Day.

"Journey didn't suck, it was simply the music you pretended to like because you thought some girl in history class might go out with you if you took her to a Journey/Styx/Triumph concert."

In my 80's teenhood, it was the opposite. I had a shoebox filled with J. Geils Band, Iron Maiden, Rush, Michael Jackson and Madonna under my bed--you can bet it stayed hidden when my cool Echo & the Bunnymen-Suicidal Tendencies-Bauhaus listening friends came over.

Tony was always listening to classic rock, so it fit the scene perfectly. But as a group......?

Suffering through high school in the early 80's, Journey, Madonna and Phil Collins were rammed down our throats, and if you watch VH1, you'd think that was pretty much it besides metal and new wave hair bands. On the other hand, the B-52's, REM, Talking Heads, the Replacements, the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Husker du, and U2 were at their best, and I'd argue that it was these bands that spawned Nirvana and the other great bands that suceeded them. Journey didn't suck, it was simply the music you pretended to like because you thought some girl in history class might go out with you if you took her to a Journey/Styx/Triumph concert.

It's overdone already, but I must interject here along with the many others and say David Marchese has potatoes in his ears. Journey is easily the worst band of any profile of the 1980s, and quite possibly the worst band of all time.

The comparison with Abbey Road is an interesting one. Certainly Abbey Road was more slick than the first Ramones album. I'll give you that. But you could probably set it up against the entire Perry-era Journey's output and Abbey Road would still win for lyrical depth, musical range and melodic invention. It's not a kind comparison for even the best artists. Journey just looks silly within half a mile of it.

Steve Perry..man, where do I start? I'll admit, the man has vocal strength and agility. And how does he use this? By mercilessly aping Sam Cooke without ever adding a scintilla of taste or soul to the mix. I kind of want to compare Perry to Pat Boone in the 1950s, but there's a much more accurate, recent analogous artist. Johnny Lang, whose guitar playing was a technically brilliant, soulless copy of earlier, grittier virtuosos. Lang, however, was 15, and allowed to be an empty copyist while he (in theory) matured and developed a sound more authentic to himself. Perry has no such excuse. He's ruined damn near every Sam Cooke album for me with his pitch-perfect, utterly mechanical belting. That is unforgivable.

They were never a great band, even in those early days when Rollie, Schon & Co. were just looking for Santana-free space to play, but Steve Perry's arrival signaled an era of deep, enduring mediocrity. I will always harbor a deep hatred for those hacks. I hated them when it was nominally cool to like them. I hated them when it was cool to hate them. And I hate them now, when not hating them is held up as some asinine badge signifying one's not being fooled by empty hipsterism. Frankly, Journey sucks. They always sucked, and they always will. And I may be throwing my lot in with the hipsters, who knows. But I refuse to be cowed into denying the truth by that threat.

On a wholly different note (and in reference to a different column), the stroh violin rocks.

"He was without question the greatest rock/pop singer in the history of Rock & Roll."

Steve Perry might be a nice singer, but rock 'n' roll isn't about nice and it never has been. Bands that pretty themselves up in order to climb the pop charts make money in the short term, but become more and more forgettable as time goes on. I'm astounded that Journey is even being mentioned in the same breath as groups like the Ramones and Led Zeppelin. They're lightweights, they're inconsequential. Thirty years from now, people are still going to know who Joey Ramone was, who Jim Morrison was, who Kurt Cobain was. Steve who? Without question the greatest rock/pop singer in the history of rock 'n' roll? Comments like this sicken me.