From { Comfort Zone } to Danger Zone: Kenny Loggins and the Most Inscrutable Lyric in Music History

1. Soundtrack for a Micro-Generation

So apparently there is a new designation for my generation—the group between Gen X and those awful Millennials that we always hear about. We Xennials are apparently a micro-generation* of folks born between 1977 and 1983. Qualifications for being a part of this new generation, according to this Guardian Quiz**, include: being afraid the first time you saw The Goonies, previous ownership of New Kids on the Block albums, and having had a Hotmail account at some point in your life (including, possibly, now).

I’d add one more qualification: you should remember Top Gun being a thing even if you were too young to go see a PG-13 movie in the theatres during its run. Perhaps more importantly than remembering the movie, you should be able to sing along to its soundtrack, which features two brilliant works by none other than Kenny Loggins, the John Williams of film scores with words.

The Top Gun soundtrack was one of my favorites growing up. (That and the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing are ranked like 1A and 1B for me as the greatest soundtracks from the first 10 years of my life***—how could I possibly choose a favorite between those two?)

If you aren’t full of mirth and goodwill towards all after rocking out to “Playing with the Boys,” then I feel sorry for you.

Pop Quiz: Which of the following songs from the Top Gun soundtrack goes with the above scene: “Take My Breath Away,” “Destination Unknown,” or “Playing With the Boys?”

Now, truth be told, Kenny Loggins songs are a bit like Dan Brown novels—they are a lot of fun so long as you don’t stop and think too hard about the words. Because if you do stop and think, you will notice your mouth saying things like:

Playing, playing with the boys
Playing, playing with the boys
After chasing sunsets
One of life’s simple joys
Is playing with the boys

I mean, it’s so cliché. Of course one of life’s simple joys is playing with the boys—what else have you got for us Kenny?

2.From Comfort Zone to “Danger Zone”

It would be extremely difficult for most of us to write iconic songs to accompany iconic scenes in iconic movies. But for Kenny Loggins? That’s just his comfort zone. Kenny’s two greatest hits are most certainly the titular theme song to Footloose (which he co-wrote) and the opening number of the Top Gun soundtrack: “Danger Zone.”

If you aren’t familiar with “Danger Zone,” (a) HOW? and (b) Please go listen to it to get super pumped about staying just this side of real danger—and then read on. The song opens with this amazing quatrain:

Revvin’ up your engine
Listen to her howlin’ roar
Metal under tension
Beggin’ you to touch and go

Just based on the number of contracted words alone, it’s clear Kenny is trying to do something special here. And unlike some other classics from the same era, Kenny doesn’t make you sit through a second verse before getting right to the chorus:

Highway to the danger zone
Ride into the danger zone

Honestly, I can barely sit still just cutting and pasting those words into this document. I have no idea where the danger zone is, but I want to be there so badly right now.

Before we get to the pièce de résistance of the song, I’d like to point out a few biographical facts that I learned from reading this excellent piece on the same subject****. First, it should be clear from that opening stanza that Kenny wants us to imagine this fighter jet as a female. And not just any woman, but a female that the pilot most definitely wants to have sex with. I don’t say this to be crude, but only to point out the obvious. If you think I’m reading too much into these words, check out the second verse:

Headin’ into twilight
Spreadin’ out her wings tonight
She got you jumpin’ off the track
And shovin’ into overdrive

Is there any other combination of words in the English language more suggestive of “sex with a lady plane” than the above? I’m skeptical.

OK, second awesome fact: Kenny Loggins wasn’t the first choice for “Danger Zone.” The song’s composers—Moroder and Whitlock—apparently really wanted Bryan Adam to perform the song. When he passed (idiot!), they wanted Toto. Can you even imagine “Danger Zone” with Toto at the helm? Anarchy! The good news is that Toto passed too (idiots!) and the composer duo settled on Loggins.

Now, I don’t know who Moroder and Whitlock are, and I honestly don’t really care, but I do know those dudes had the luckiest break of their lives when Loggins said YES. Now, Kenny’s name is plastered on the thing so as far as I’m concerned he’s responsible for the contents.

This guy is a dreamboat. Or the Unabomber. Either way, you have no choice but to be enchanted.

Those interesting historical tidbits aside, we have finally arrived at what is not only the strangest lyric in “Danger Zone,” but arguably one of the strangest lyrics in the history of all of music.

3. From “Danger Zone” to Twilight Zone

After a second round of the chorus Kenny opens the third verse with this cryptic line:

You’ll never say hello to you

Let me pause a moment to give some personal context. I’m one of those people who is horrible at learning the correct lyrics to songs. I’m way too impatient to listen to a song three or four times before I start singing along—and so whatever words I think I’m hearing after the first or second listen become the words I sing forever.

The thing about this line is that those are the actual words. And I always assumed I was singing totally incorrect words because, well, “you’ll never say hello to you” makes absolutely zero sense as a lyric in a song. As the author of the piece cited above notes, “if I walked around my workplace announcing to coworkers ‘You’ll never say hello to you,’ then they would call the police and have me taken away.”

The rest of the verse gives no hint at what the composers may have meant:

You’ll never say hello to you
Until you get it on the red line overload
You’ll never know what you can do
Until you get it up as high as you can go

Nope, just more lyrics suggesting sex with planes.

One interesting take on this line is suggested by a user over at Genius.com, who states that

We’ve arrived in the Danger Zone to find out that, similar to the vision quests practiced by certain Native American cultures, it functions as a guide to spiritual enlightenment that involves mastering the most dangerous technology created by man. It’s not until said technology has been pushed to its limits and the user has lived to tell about it that one’s true identity is forged. And along with this identity taking shape, the mind begins to grasp all the kickass shit it can now do.

According to this user’s interpretation, Kenny (really Moroder and Whitlock) are portraying piloting a fighter jet to other spiritual journeys where one can truly “finding oneself.” You’ll never say hello to you…

Honestly, this seems plausible. But even if it’s true that this is the underlying meaning of the phrase, we have only pushed the mystery from a conceptual puzzle to a semantic one: Why did they use such an awkward, near unintelligible, phrase, when “you’ll never really know yourself”  would have done the trick?

If Van Halen had opted to title their encomium to Pepsi Clear “the temporal period at the nexus between the present and the future” instead of “Right Now”—wouldn’t you wonder why?

Another plausible explanation is that the composers got stuck on the opening line to that verse and after bashing their heads against the wall for 4 to 7 days they finally said, “Screw it,’You’ll never say hello to you’ sounds similar enough to ‘You’ll never know what you can do’ and nobody is ever going to bother learning the lyrics anyways since Toto passed on performing it.”

In any case, we are left with an enigma wrapped in an otherwise completely awesome and appropriately edgy song for that period. So what are we to make of this?

4. From Twilight Zone to Existential Crisis

In 1931, a mathematician by the name of Kurt Godel published a set of papers proving a totally bizarre thing: that you could never be sure that whatever mathematical system you were working with (be it algebra or arithmetic) didn’t have some unforeseen logical flaw. That is, you could never say with 100 percent certainty that the rules (or axioms, in math speak) of arithmetic wouldn’t one day lead you to some absurd and illogical statement like 1+1 = 1. Of course, as of this writing no one has found said tragic flaw in arithmetic, algebra, calculus, or any other kind of mathematical system—but Godel is always there reminding us that you can’t completely rule out the possibility.

What does this have to do with “Danger Zone”? Well, most of us have given over a part of ourselves to music—whether making it or just listening—in the assumption that at the end of the day it matters somehow. That it is self-consistent, maybe not in the same way as mathematics, but in the sense that it doesn’t aspire to be profound in one verse and then bust out with complete gibberish in the next. Because who would take that seriously?

And yet, Danger Zone. This is a song that whisks us away to an aircraft carrier at dusk, where men and women risk their lives to secure our freedoms against faceless Russians in MIG fighter jets, and also contains this line:

You’ll never say hello to you

It’s a glitch in the matrix of our collective musical experience. I don’t know if Kenny is our Morpheus or our Agent Smith.

At this point though, I’m not sure it matters. I’m not sure anything does.

Footnotes:

* Micro-Generation is a fitting term since we are the generation that first discovered the wonders of MicroMachines™.

** What’s weird about this quiz is that I’m pretty sure the primary qualifier for being an Xennial is being born between 1977 and 1983. Not sure why you need this quiz then, when you could literally just check your birth certificate, but whatevs.

*** The best soundtrack from the second decade of my life is Last of the Mohicans. No A/B designations needed for that one.

**** So I stumbled onto this blog article AFTER deciding I would write about “Danger Zone” for the Comfort Zone prompt. Is this current piece you are reading just a Sam Smith styled re-jingling of that blog post? Maybe, but I’d like to think I’ve added something here and thus at least cleared myself of downright copyright infringement.

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