Posted on 05/09/2017 1:12:47 PM PDT by nickcarraway
What does the typical Billy Joel fan look like? It’s a serious question. We can, I think to at least a small degree of accuracy, guess what the typical Sex Pistols fan looked like back in their heyday, or the typical Spice Girls fan in theirs. But, what about Billy Joel? His music is so nondescript, so family-restaurant friendly, so bland, so cheesy, that its lack of concrete identity aside from its popularity and its blandness makes it difficult to imagine just who buys his albums, just who packs the sold out arenas.
Let’s think about it this way perhaps – Billy Joel is the suburbs of music. The term “ugly” is so often misapplied to the suburbs (some, at least). I say misapplied, because the suburbs, as I’ve lived them, are not positively ugly, like, say, Jean Dubuffet’s “Art Brut,” but rather they have a sort of negative ugliness, which is to say, they lack any qualities whatsoever. The “ugliness” of the suburbs is in reality nothing more than the banality, the boringness of the suburbs. As opposed to brutalism, which can often be ugly, but in a positive, fascinating sense, if the suburbs are oppressive, it is only because there is nothing to latch on to, nothing interesting. This seems to me the best description, by way of analogy, of Billy Joel’s music – negatively terrible. This, again, does not bring us any closer to visualizing the typical Billy Joel superfan, but it at least let’s us theorize about why we can’t.
In any event, the occasion for these thoughts is, of course, Joel’s birthday. The man seems, like the suburbs, timeless – he’s still around, still making music, still selling out shows. Long after we’re gone – cockroaches, Joel, office buildings, and, probably, (I shudder at the thought) The Eagles. But my hatred for Joel’s music doesn’t run as deep as some. Despite his eternal dullness, he does have some okay songs. No, if you want some real, wonderful, joyous vitriol, look no further than Ron Rosenbaum’s 2009 article for Slate, “The Worst Pop Singer Ever.” Rosenbaum is the author of books like “Explaining Hitler” and “How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III,” so when he writes about Joel’s music, well, he knows what he’s talking about. The article is one of those perennial internet gems, the epitome of “evergreen content” – so long as Joel is around (forever), this article will be necessary. But enough from me – Happy birthday Billy, and here’s Rosenbaum.
Read more:
He does an article on over rated $h!tty music and doesnt even think to do it about Pink Floyd. I should take this guy seriously?
“Maggie May” was released in
July of 1971....
I’m lukewarm on Billy Joel, some stuff OK, some stuff change the station. But, the guy did pull Christy Brinkley, and that’s a whole ton more than we can say for some POS writer/music critic that no one has ever heard of.
Billy Joel - Uptown Girl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCuMWrfXG4E
I am not sure what to make of at 2:10 and 2:34
Do New Jersey guys wear cutoff shirts?
#40 The concert was so bad they tore down Shea Stadium? : )
...and next week he will probably telling us that U2 was the greatest band ever and that they changed his life. Twit.
Or, with the possibility
of getting flamed, what
would the author think
of Eddy Money? I’ll take
Billy Joel....
:)
And he was knocking socks with Elle MacPerson and Christie Brinkley.
Respect
Wow. Is that song (Maggie May) really that old?
I thought I recalled hearing in in 74, the same summer Issac Hayes came out with ‘Shaft’. Maybe I wasn’t really paying attention in 71, still being in grade school and all.
Piano Man update:
It’s twelve am at the Javits
And the tears have started to fall
She needs three states to pull it out
And she is behind in them all
They cried, “Please, can you give us a miracle
Please please let her pull ahead”
But no miracle comes. There’s no no victory speech
And they get Podesta instead.
LOL LOL LOL, LOL LOL LOL
LOL LOL, LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
Thanks for the tears, girls and girly men
Thanks for the pain and fright
When I’m in the mood for some comedy
I YouTube “Election Night”
I liked a lot of his earlier stuff. Kind of got stale to me after about Glass Houses.
Nobody has mentioned “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” one of his earlier ‘hits’ that I particularly liked.
The Stranger was probably his best and most complete thought-out and performed album. The zenith of his creative output in my opinion.
I was 16 and was impressed
by a wide array of genre
playing on the radio.
Led Zeppelin, Cream, the
Doors, Janice Joplin, Jimmy
Hendrix, Doby Grey, Elton
John, The Greatful Dead,
Joanie Mitchel, Linda
Rondstat, Michael Nesmith,
The Beatles, Iron Butterfly,
The Jackson 5, Stepenwolf,
The Hollies. We had a lot
to listen to back then.
Each of them had something
I listen to to this day. But
there are some of their
songs I don’t listen to.
I like Rod Stewart’s Maggie
May and associate that song
with one of my youthful
first loves.
Their penchant for writing hugely popular and saccharine sweet top 40 type songs is what makes them akin to the Monkees.
This is so stupid.
Only thing that comes to mind about Billy is how he latched onto Christie Brinkley and Katie Lee. Christy didn’t need the money. Katie was a good looking 22 year old nobody back in 2004 so I see how that went down.
OMG, I have a personal benchmark of trying to switch stations on XM when a Pearl Jam tune comes on when I’m listening to Lithium station in the least amount of notes. I’ve gotten to the point where I can “feel a disturbance in the force” sometimes due to the ripple in reality caused by Vetters whiney pretentiousness and catch it before it occurs...
You must be an alien.
When did you land?
Must not have been to
long ago if you’re
listening to Pearl Jam.
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