Life Is a Highway: On Tom Cochrane and the Uses of Cliché

This essay was originally published in March Fadness

When one is young, even as one’s taste remains malleable and relatively unformed, one begins to realize that to be able to assert with confidence what one likes—sincerely and without fear of coming across as uncool—is a complex form of power toward which to aspire.

When I was young, from the academic years of 1992-1993 and 1993-1994, I attended Jefferson Junior High School in the Chicago suburb of Woodridge, Illinois. Once every month, all of us malleable middle-schoolers had an opportunity to test out our musical taste at the Video Dances put on in the Jefferson gymnasium by the Woodridge Park District.

On those Friday nights, the DJ—or VJ, I guess—would set up his stereo speakers and his enormous projector in the space that doubled as our cafeteria and smelled faintly, always, of tater tots and unwashed PE uniforms. Against the wall, out of the way of the bleachers and basketball hoops, he’d set up his screen, vast and white like the sail of a ship that would transport us shortly to exotic realms we’d glimpsed on MTV. We’d watch and dance, dance and watch. Seeing, hearing, and moving to those songs was a big freaking deal because in those pre-YouTube days, there was no guarantee that you could simply click a link and see an artist’s visual interpretation of a song you admired.

For some reason never explained to any of us, each of these dances would conclude with the same two-song send-off: first “Life Is a Highway” by Tom Cochrane followed by “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC. Both songs are full of innuendo and explicit sexiness, and I loved both of them, as did my peers as evidenced by the sweaty vigor of the dancing and the head-banging and the fist-pumping that they did in response to both of them.

What I didn’t say then (fear of coming across as uncool by criticizing either beloved piece) was that I understood “You Shook Me All Night Long” to be the superior song—musically, probably, but definitely lyrically. Sure, the title was familiar, but the individual lines—“knocking me out with those American thighs,” “working double time on the seduction line”—were fresh and hilarious. Even the VJ seemed implicitly to agree with my assessment—“Life Is a Highway” was the penultimate, not the ultimate heading-triumphantly-off-into- the-night song.

I really enjoyed “Life Is a Highway,” but I knew even then that the title and entire premise of the song were huge clichés: expressions and ideas which have become overused to the point of losing their original meaning or impact.

Life is a highway.

Perhaps at some point very shortly after the passage under Eisenhower of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, the phrase was considered novel, but many decades later, it seems irritating and trite.

Cars are terrible, encouraging a sedentary lifestyle and destroying the environment. And highways are awful—high-speed, ugly, dull ways to get from one place to another, deliberately void of the charm offered by scenic routes or rail.

To call anything that is not actually a highway a highway certainly betrays a lack of original thought.

Life is not literally a highway. It should be against the lyrical law to say that it is. And yet.

Cochrane makes the banality sound so good: poppy and optimistic. Unstoppable even. I mean: “Life’s like a road that you travel on / When there’s one day here and the next day gone. / Sometimes you bend and sometimes you stand / Sometimes you turn your back to the wind. / There’s a world outside every darkened door / Where the blues won’t haunt you anymore.”

The video makes it look good as well. Shot in the Badlands of Alberta Canada, it shows Cochrane playing guitar amid striking rock formations and follows the golden-lit road-trip adventures of an attractive young couple: driving a 1965 Chevy Impala with the top down through beautifully desolate landscapes, cavorting as they wait for a car ferry to cross a river, changing a tire, stopping at a road house to play pool, breezing by an eccentric but harmless cast of roadside characters—gas station attendants, members of an austere religious order, Cochrane himself wearing a leather jacket and standing inexplicably in the middle of the road playing his harmonica, et al.

The two youthful lovers do everything in their power to invite you to want to be them: perfect wind-tossed hair, glowing sun-kissed skin, optimal early-90s jeans, bandanas, sunglasses and tank tops. “Where the brave are free and lovers soar / Come ride with me to the distant shore.” Who wouldn’t want to say yes to that invitation? Especially at 12 or 13? Hackneyed as the chorus is—“Life is a highway / I wanna ride it all night long. / If you’re going my way / I wanna drive it all night long”—its confidence seduces.

A quarter century after hearing it over and over at the video dances, I realize that I didn’t love the song then and I don’t love it now in spite of its clichés, but because of them. “All night long” as if nothing else matters and we’ll never grow old or fall out of love or die. Of course we’ll do all of that, and of course life is a lot of things, though none of them are highways. But who cares because the song is so happy and welcoming. “Life is a Highway” is the audio equivalent of a big friendly golden retriever asking you to play fetch; you’d have to have a heart of stone to resist.

The song appears on Cochrane’s 1991 album Mad Mad World, and it’s not nostalgia that moves me to say that the world has since gotten quite a bit madder.

The song became a number one hit in his native Canada and reached number six on the Billboard charts here in the United States in 1992—his only one to crack the Top 40.

Listening to “Life is a Highway” on repeat to write this essay (in late November of 2016 in the wake of the most catastrophic American presidential election that I’ve been alive for) and again to revise it (in late January of 2017 in the wake of the fascistic and pathologically dishonest Donald Trump’s week—and counting—of fulfilling all his most repellant campaign promises) lends the song poignancy now that it didn’t have for me then. I think harder than I did in junior high about Cochrane’s being from Canada, our boring and kindly neighbor to the north. Here in the States, we live, as the purported curse says, in interesting times; our new president is a corrupt, racist, misogynist, xenophobic authoritarian maniac with narcissistic personality disorder and little apparent interest in civil or human rights.

Much preferable would be to ride the highway of life down here in a fashion more closely resembling the life-highway of Canada. Much preferable would be to have a leader as evidently civil, empathetic, and progressive as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Much preferable to be under the direction of someone like him, who in November of 2015 introduced a 30-person cabinet that was half men and half women, and who, when asked to explain the gender parity of this group, replied, “Because it’s 2015.” Or who in January of 2017, in response to Trump’s unconstitutional travel ban on refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, tweeted: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada”

Straightforward. Matter-of-fact. Life is a highway.

Would that the highways in the U.S. could be equally appealing.

And that at the end of them, we could let the people who want—and need—to be here in.

I once heard a Catholic priest say, “With ritual, what is natural becomes supernatural.” Which sounds to me like a recipe for magic. Which sounds to me like why the VJ always sent us home from the Video Dances with those two songs.

I value rituals—maybe not religious ones, per se, since religion comes with too much oppression and expectation. But secular, community-based rituals that are all-inclusive and offer to encompass everyone give us all a common basis for interacting and being together in a particular moment, surrounded by love and not subject to fear. Cliché to say that life is a highway. But it could be. A highway. With room on it for everybody. Or it could if we want it to be.