If I were to claim here that Petra Haden has recorded the song of the year, I’m certain she wouldn’t believe me. What to me is the supremely perfect encapsulation of this cultural moment is to her basically a lark. Included on Guilty By Association, the song is supposed to evince the kind of one-sided irony where it’s funny to like an old Journey song (don’t let on). Never mind that the original is the greatest American anthem this side of "Born To Run," no guilt required. Haden’s fervent cover manifests a stone-faced absurdity that, like much of the best comedy, courts laughter only to hide how deadly serious it is.

It’s a simple idea. Haden lovingly recreates the original note-for-note using only vocals and vocalizations. This is a technique
she’s used on several releases including Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out, but it reaches its apex here. The result is both silly and stunning, and often both at once as in the guitarmonies at the end of the bridge. We can’t help but be in on the joke, and yet the detailed phrasing and earnest delivery are anything but a gag. If this is just for shits and giggles, then why pour so many fervent hours into its birth? The most elegant answer must be, “it was fun,” though the recording remains so much more.

In the twilight of American dominance, the superpower appears as an ever-expanding set of variations on a theme written long ago, each played more faintly than the last. Its genres are the ossified objects of ironic reconstruction; the genuine American drama like, say, the Western, can no longer hold the stage, so instead we mount again and again a grim satire of all that was once held true. We make “Westerns” so mired in their own mythology that all our pleasure comes from tracing the intertext, never caring whether we believe in what is said. Even The Sopranos, arguably the greatest product of American pop culture in 30 years, cannot help but operate as a tragi-comedy, funny for all its seriousness because of its doting reiteration of notes that sounded better in the original.

If we cannot decide whether we relive through the Iraq War the
unending quagmire of Vietnam or the unfulfilled splutterings of the
Gulf War, we are certain of this: the feeling in the pit of the
stomach is the ache of having seen it all before. Funny that this same malaise of been-there, done-that pervades popular music, where there are no remaining American anthems. The closest we come to genuinely unironic space is the overstated earnestness of Win Butler, whose attempt to remain outside or against irony only proves how thoroughly it cannot be done. Garage rock, new wave, whatever the Springsteen-aping thing everyone is doing now is called. It is all a knowing, winking reconstruction of places we love desperately but know we can never truly inhabit again.

Haden’s "Don’t Stop Believin’" constructs an accidental fabric of intertexts so thick it’s hard to believe its unintended. Though it was recorded before the finale aired, Haden picked the song that would end The Sopranos and, with it, some sort of era-defining reflection of America. As if driving the final nail in the coffin of this era, her version ends with a quote (at 3:41) from Wilson Phillips, a three-hit wonder made up of the daughters of aging ’60s rock stars. Haden’s cover connects with phenomena that are themselves covers, shadows of things we once enjoyed in earnest. Confronted with a possible infinite regress of replication, one begins to wonder where the original is, as even Francis Ford Coppola and Brian Wilson these days can no longer claim to be a beginning. Haden’s version thus plunges us into the capricious doubt of the simulacra, the national culture as system-without-a-centre. Our irony resuscitates that which once sustained us only to kill it dead.

Haden’s "Don’t Stop Believin’" is a requiem for this lost faith that is both cathartic for our sorrow and joyful in memory of a life well lived. Yes, how funny and how unbelievably sad Haden’s rendition is. And how ironic, ultimately, that such an ardent and corrosively mocking reprise of all we once were still seeks to tell us, with near-extinguished optimism, “Don’t stop believin’.”

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