When I was a kid and heard on TV shows about “nights out”, I always imagined something like the video for Glenn Frey’s You Belong to the City. Busy streets, marquees with incandescent bulbs following patterns, arcades, and stores ready to close and crawl back home, backs broken from working all day.

So when I was old enough to just saunter about by myself, I would think of this song, without ever knowing it was one of the lead singles from Michael Mann’s glitzy Miami Vice show. I was never keen on it when I was a kid and it took me a while to rediscover it.

We didn’t have a Times Square (or its surroundings) in Mexico for me to kinda recreate what the video shows, but I always imagined Insurgentes, near the roundabout or Tlalpan, although with time I think the latter was not an option. Insurgentes, however, was cool enough for Paul Verhoeven to use as a futuristic Earth in his mindbending actioneer, Total Recall.

I used to date a girl in the late 90s and our meeting place was always Insurgentes. After we broke up, I think started to visit the place and wondered if she was still there and if everything was a big misunderstanding or a bad dream. It wasn’t and eventually had to move on.

Insurgentes has changed so much over the years. It felt slightly dangerous, but never in the “ah, this is my kill-screen” sort of way. It’s not as disneyfied as Times Squares is, though, but it feels more like a mall than the funky place it used to be.

You belong to the city is the second song Glenn Frey did for a cop-themed piece of pop culture. First one was the sax-friendly The Heat is On for Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy’s megahit from 1984. If a saxophone lead-in was worth gold then, it was surely a perfect hook for You Belong to the City.

Glenn Frey, as any of The Eagles, did some great solo stuff. We can stand here all day and talk about egos, but I still think Frey’s vocals and ear for a good tune are undisputed.

-Sam J. Valdés López