No they were not on the same label. And Bernstein called pop music garbage all the time. Joel has actually been denigrated as “A Classical musician’s idea of a Rock and Roller.” I take that as a compliment. I couldn’t care less about ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ rock.
That slate article was a piece of junk with glaring factual and logical errors. Rosenbaum does nothing but go over ‘lyrical attitudes’ and doesn’t seem to understand what actually makes Joel’s work worthwhile (a sense of melody and song structure after Irving Berlin and Burt Bacharach). Also, the guy seems to think that all of Joel’s songs were written at about the same time by a Rich Rock Star. Up until the late 1970s, Joel was basically a struggling musician. If not for Barbara Streisand’s timely cover of ‘NY State of Mind’ he may actually have been dropped from Columbia records.
He’s basically a writer of Broadway showtunes. If you don’t like that aesthetic fine. You’ve obviously disliked Joel’s music for a long time but the qualities I went over are there. Most of his boomer contemporaries are playing county fairs these days. Joel is still huge with multiple age groups for a reason.
Just another reason to hate Babs.
Seriously, if you want to admit that Billy Joel's music is a guilty pleasure of yours, I can go along with that. We all have guilty pleasures. He is not however, a musical genius.