South Detroit: Whaaat?

This "South Detroit" line has always bothered me in that infamous Journey song.  There is NO such thing as South Detroit! East side, west side. Even north (not really...). Here's an explanation, and it is simple.

Now, thanks to New York Magazine, we know what former Journey front man Steve Perry was thinking when he wrote the lyrics.

Perry tells that mag that the song’s imagery came to him one sleepless night in May 1980 while Journey was in Detroit for a five-night stand as part of the group’s Departure Tour.

“I was digging the idea of how the lights were facing down so that you couldn’t see anything,” he said as he recalled looking out a hotel room window at 2 a.m. “All of a sudden I’d see people walking out of the dark, and into the light. And the term ‘streetlight people’ came to me. So Detroit was very much in my consciousness when we started writing.” (The song includes the line: “Streetlight people/ Living just to find emotion/ Hiding somewhere in the night.”

And South Detroit? Well, that was just poetic license.

“I ran the phonetics of east, west, and north, but nothing sounded as good or emotionally true to me as South Detroit,” Perry said. “The syntax just sounded right. I fell in love with the line. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve learned that there is no South Detroit. But it doesn’t matter.”