paulisded
01-24-2009, 12:01 PM
I agree with everything this guy says.
http://www.slate.com/id/2209526/
The Worst Pop Singer Ever
Why, exactly, is Billy Joel so bad?
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, Jan. 23, 2009, at 7:23 PM ET
This may seem an odd moment to bring up the subject of Billy Joel. But
the recent death of the painter Andrew Wyeth revived a long-standing
debate over whether his art is respectable or merely sentimental
schlock. (Say it: good or bad?) It got me to thinking about the
question of value in art and whether there are any absolute standards
for judging it. It indicates the question is still alive, not
relegated to irrelevance by relativism.
And then I picked up The Art Instinct, a new book by Denis Dutton, the
curator of the Arts & Letters Daily Web site. The book strives
valiantly to find a basis for judging the value of art from the
perspective of evolutionary psychology; in it, Dutton argues that a
certain kind of artistic talent offered a competitive advantage in the
Darwinian struggle for survival.
Which brings me to Billy Joel the Andrew Wyeth of contemporary pop
music and the continuing irritation I feel whenever I hear his tunes,
whether in the original or in the multitude of elevator-Muzak
versions. It is a kind of mystery: Why does his music make my skin
crawl in a way that other bad music doesn't? Why is it that so many of
us feel it is possible to say Billy Joel is well just bad, a blight
upon pop music, a plague upon the airwaves more contagious than West
Nile virus, a dire threat to the peacefulness of any given elevator
ride, not rock 'n' roll but schlock 'n' roll?
I'm reluctant to pick on Billy Joel. He's been subject to withering
contempt from hipster types for so long that it no longer seems worth
the time. Still, the mystery persists: How can he be so bad and yet so
popular for so long? He's still there. You can't defend yourself with
anti-B.J. shields around your brain. He still takes up the space,
takes up A&R advances that would otherwise support a score of
unrecognized but genuinely talented artists, singers, and songwriters,
with his loathsomely insipid simulacrum of rock.
Besides, some people still take Billy seriously. Just the other day I
was reading my old friend Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine blog, and Jarvis
(the Billy Joel of blog theorists) was attacking the Times' David
Carr. (Talk about an uneven fight.) Carr was speculating about whether
newspapers could survive if they adopted the economic model of iTunes.
Attempting a snotty put-down of this idea, Jarvis let slip that he's a
Joel fan: As an example somehow of his iTunes counter-theory, he
wrote: "If I can't get Allentown, the original, I'm not likely to
settle for a cover." Only the hard-core B.J. for Jeff! ("Allentown" is
a particularly shameless selection on Jarvis' part, since it's one of
B.J.'s "concern" songs, featuring the plight of laid-off workers, and
Jarvis virtually does a sack dance of self-congratulatory joy every
time he reports on print-media workers getting the ax.)
Plus, there's always the chance we'll see another of those "career
re-evaluation" essays that places like the New York Times Sunday "Arts
& Leisure" section are fond of running about the Barry Manilows of the
world. The kind of piece in which we'd discover that Billy's actually
"gritty," "unfairly marginalized" by hipsters; that his work is
profoundly expressive of late-20th-century alienation ("Captain
Jack"); that his hackneyed, misogynist hymns to love are actually
filled with sophisticated erotic angst; that his "distillations of
disillusion," to use the patois of such pieces, over the artist's role
("Piano Man," "The Entertainer," "Say Goodbye to Hollywood," etc.) are
in fact "preternaturally self-conscious," not just shallow, Holden
Caulfield-esque denunciations of "phonies," but mentionable in the
same breath as works by great artists.
This must be prevented! No career re-evaluations please! No false
contrarian rehabilitations! He was terrible, he is terrible, he always
will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative,
fraudulently rebellious. Joel's famous song "It's Still Rock and Roll
to Me"? Please. It never was rock 'n' roll. Billy Joel's music
elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its
own new and awful genre: "Mock-Rock."
And the badness of really bad art is, I believe, always worth
affirming, since it allows us to praise and to examine why we
praise "good" or "great" art.
Therefore, I decided to make a serious effort to identify the
consistent qualities across Joel's "body of work" (it almost hurts to
write that) that make it so meretricious, so fraudulent, so pitifully
bad. And so, risking humiliation and embarrassment, I ventured to the
Barnes & Noble music section and bought a four-disc set of B.J.'s
"Greatest Hits," one of which was a full disc of his musings about art
and music. I must admit that I also bought a copy of an album I
already had Return of the Grievous Angel, covers of Gram Parsons songs
by the likes of the Cowboy Junkies and Gillian Welch, whose "Hickory
Wind" is just ravishing so the cashier might think the B.J. box was
merely a gift, maybe for someone with no musical taste. Yes, reader. I
couldn't bear the sneer, even for your benefit.
And I think I've done it! I think I've identified the qualities in
B.J.'s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness:
It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for
others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is
contempt's backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the
supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the
rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.
I'm not saying, by the way, that contempt can't make for great art.
Dylan's "Positively 4th Street," for example, is one of the most
contemptuous songs ever written, but it redeems itself through the
joyfulness of its black-humored eloquence and wit. And Springsteen
lost something when he lost his contempt and became a
love-for-the-common-people would-be Woody Guthrie.
But let's go through the "greatest hits" chronologically and see how
this "contempt thesis" works out.
First let's take "Piano Man." You can hear Joel's contempt, both for
the losers at the bar he's left behind in his stellar schlock stardom
and for the "entertainer-loser" (the proto-B.J.) who plays for them.
Even the self-contempt he imputes to the "piano man" rings false.
"Captain Jack": Loser dresses up in poseur clothes and masturbates and
shoots up heroin and is an all-around phony in the eyes of the
songwriter who is so, so superior to him.
"The Entertainer": Entertainers are phonies! Except exquisitely
self-aware entertainers like B.J., who let you in on this secret.
(Compare The Band's beautiful, subtle tribute to Dylan's entertainer
insecurities in "Stage Fright." I love the line in that song, "he got
caught in the spotlight": such a haunting image of a shy entertainer.)
"Say Goodbye to Hollywood." Hollywood is phony! Who knew? God, doesn't
B.J. ever get tired of showing us how phony the phonies of this phony
world are? Could someone let B.J. know he's phoning it in with all
this phoniness at this point? Isn't there something, well, a bit phony
about his hysteria over phoniness?
He can't even celebrate his "New York State of Mind" without
displaying his oh-so-rebellious contempt for "the movie stars in their
fancy cars and their limousines." You think Billy Joel has really
never ridden in a limo?
"The Stranger": This is B.J. lifting that great Beatles line about
Eleanor Rigby putting on "the face that she keeps by the door." You
should see the heavy-handed mask featured on the expensive two-disc
"legacy" reissue of "The Stranger" album. So deep! Yes, B.J., you've
nailed it: We're all phonies hiding our true faces! Everyone wears a
mask! Who woulda known it without B.J. to tell us?
"Scenes From an Italian Restaurant": I can't stand it, but at least
this is one of B.J.'s tributes to "the little people" that although
it's annoying and clichid to the max doesn't completely hold its
characters in contempt.
"Anthony's Song" straight up contempt for lower-middle-class
aspirations. B.J.'s down with the authentic shit in life. This is the
one with the line about the "heart attack-ack-ack" where he
attack-ack-acks people who work two jobs so they can "trade in their
Chevy for a Cadillac"-ack-ack, something B.J. would never do. No phony
"movin' up" for him!
"Only the Good Die Young": Contempt for the Catholic religion. I know:
It's spirited if anti-spiritual, but, still ... I've heard some
Catholic girls opine on its most famous line ("Catholic girls start
much too late"), and they ain't buyin' it. B.J. is no James Joyce.
"She's Always a Woman": First, has there ever been a more blatant or
blatantly inept case of attempted artistic theft than "She's Always a
Woman"? It's such a lame imitation of Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman."
(B.J.'s woman "hides like a child" where Dylan's "breaks just like a
little girl.") B.J.'s woman also: is prone to "casual lies," "steals
like a thief," "takes care of herself," and "carelessly cuts you and
laughs ..." Poor B.J., recycling every misogynist clichi in the book.
At this point, reader, perhaps you have some questions for me about
this tirade? Fair enough.
What right do you have to criticize such a popular artist? Aren't you
just being elitist?
No, you don't understand: Billy's from my 'hood, mid-Long
Island Hicksville, to be precise (I'm from Bay Shore) so I'm sensitive
to his abuse of our common roots. Once I wrote something about the
curse of being from the Guyland. In it I said something heartfelt: New
Jersey may have a rep as a toxic dump for mob victims to fester in,
but at least it brought forth Bruce Springsteen. The ultimate Guyland
humiliation is to be repped to the world by Billy Joel. So I feel
entitled to be cruel may I continue?
OK. But isn't there anything you like?
Fair question. I've always liked "The Longest Time" and "An Innocent
Man." May I get back to the contemptible crap?
OK, but focus.
Well, I really can't stand the "man of the people" stuff. Like
"Allentown" and "The Downeaster 'Alexa.' " Yeah, he's a real working
man, that B.J. Sure, other artists strike that pose, but somehow with
B.J. the strain of his pretension is just too much to bear.
What else? What if you had to choose one song as the epitome of B.J. badness?
OK, I think it would have to be "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me."
Why?
It shows how completely, totally clueless Billy Joel is. It suggests
he wrote it because he thought people regarded him as an outmoded
relic because he doesn't wear the right hip-signifier clothes. That
it's a matter of his wide ties vs. New Wave skinny ties, that it's
because his car doesn't have white-wall tires or because he doesn't
dress "like a Beau Brummell" or hang out with the right crowd or look
like Elvis Costello.
He thinks people can't stand him because he dresses wrong or doesn't look
right.
Billy Joel, they can't stand you because of your music; because of
your stupid, smug attitude; because of the way you ripped off your
betters to produce music that rarely reaches the level even of
mediocrity. You could dress completely au courant and people would
still loathe your lame lyrics.
It's not that they dislike anything exterior about you. They dislike
you because of who you really are inside. They dislike you for being
you. At a certain point, consistent, aggressive badness justifies
profound hostility. They hate you just the way you are.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
http://www.slate.com/id/2209526/
The Worst Pop Singer Ever
Why, exactly, is Billy Joel so bad?
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, Jan. 23, 2009, at 7:23 PM ET
This may seem an odd moment to bring up the subject of Billy Joel. But
the recent death of the painter Andrew Wyeth revived a long-standing
debate over whether his art is respectable or merely sentimental
schlock. (Say it: good or bad?) It got me to thinking about the
question of value in art and whether there are any absolute standards
for judging it. It indicates the question is still alive, not
relegated to irrelevance by relativism.
And then I picked up The Art Instinct, a new book by Denis Dutton, the
curator of the Arts & Letters Daily Web site. The book strives
valiantly to find a basis for judging the value of art from the
perspective of evolutionary psychology; in it, Dutton argues that a
certain kind of artistic talent offered a competitive advantage in the
Darwinian struggle for survival.
Which brings me to Billy Joel the Andrew Wyeth of contemporary pop
music and the continuing irritation I feel whenever I hear his tunes,
whether in the original or in the multitude of elevator-Muzak
versions. It is a kind of mystery: Why does his music make my skin
crawl in a way that other bad music doesn't? Why is it that so many of
us feel it is possible to say Billy Joel is well just bad, a blight
upon pop music, a plague upon the airwaves more contagious than West
Nile virus, a dire threat to the peacefulness of any given elevator
ride, not rock 'n' roll but schlock 'n' roll?
I'm reluctant to pick on Billy Joel. He's been subject to withering
contempt from hipster types for so long that it no longer seems worth
the time. Still, the mystery persists: How can he be so bad and yet so
popular for so long? He's still there. You can't defend yourself with
anti-B.J. shields around your brain. He still takes up the space,
takes up A&R advances that would otherwise support a score of
unrecognized but genuinely talented artists, singers, and songwriters,
with his loathsomely insipid simulacrum of rock.
Besides, some people still take Billy seriously. Just the other day I
was reading my old friend Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine blog, and Jarvis
(the Billy Joel of blog theorists) was attacking the Times' David
Carr. (Talk about an uneven fight.) Carr was speculating about whether
newspapers could survive if they adopted the economic model of iTunes.
Attempting a snotty put-down of this idea, Jarvis let slip that he's a
Joel fan: As an example somehow of his iTunes counter-theory, he
wrote: "If I can't get Allentown, the original, I'm not likely to
settle for a cover." Only the hard-core B.J. for Jeff! ("Allentown" is
a particularly shameless selection on Jarvis' part, since it's one of
B.J.'s "concern" songs, featuring the plight of laid-off workers, and
Jarvis virtually does a sack dance of self-congratulatory joy every
time he reports on print-media workers getting the ax.)
Plus, there's always the chance we'll see another of those "career
re-evaluation" essays that places like the New York Times Sunday "Arts
& Leisure" section are fond of running about the Barry Manilows of the
world. The kind of piece in which we'd discover that Billy's actually
"gritty," "unfairly marginalized" by hipsters; that his work is
profoundly expressive of late-20th-century alienation ("Captain
Jack"); that his hackneyed, misogynist hymns to love are actually
filled with sophisticated erotic angst; that his "distillations of
disillusion," to use the patois of such pieces, over the artist's role
("Piano Man," "The Entertainer," "Say Goodbye to Hollywood," etc.) are
in fact "preternaturally self-conscious," not just shallow, Holden
Caulfield-esque denunciations of "phonies," but mentionable in the
same breath as works by great artists.
This must be prevented! No career re-evaluations please! No false
contrarian rehabilitations! He was terrible, he is terrible, he always
will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative,
fraudulently rebellious. Joel's famous song "It's Still Rock and Roll
to Me"? Please. It never was rock 'n' roll. Billy Joel's music
elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its
own new and awful genre: "Mock-Rock."
And the badness of really bad art is, I believe, always worth
affirming, since it allows us to praise and to examine why we
praise "good" or "great" art.
Therefore, I decided to make a serious effort to identify the
consistent qualities across Joel's "body of work" (it almost hurts to
write that) that make it so meretricious, so fraudulent, so pitifully
bad. And so, risking humiliation and embarrassment, I ventured to the
Barnes & Noble music section and bought a four-disc set of B.J.'s
"Greatest Hits," one of which was a full disc of his musings about art
and music. I must admit that I also bought a copy of an album I
already had Return of the Grievous Angel, covers of Gram Parsons songs
by the likes of the Cowboy Junkies and Gillian Welch, whose "Hickory
Wind" is just ravishing so the cashier might think the B.J. box was
merely a gift, maybe for someone with no musical taste. Yes, reader. I
couldn't bear the sneer, even for your benefit.
And I think I've done it! I think I've identified the qualities in
B.J.'s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness:
It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for
others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is
contempt's backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the
supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the
rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.
I'm not saying, by the way, that contempt can't make for great art.
Dylan's "Positively 4th Street," for example, is one of the most
contemptuous songs ever written, but it redeems itself through the
joyfulness of its black-humored eloquence and wit. And Springsteen
lost something when he lost his contempt and became a
love-for-the-common-people would-be Woody Guthrie.
But let's go through the "greatest hits" chronologically and see how
this "contempt thesis" works out.
First let's take "Piano Man." You can hear Joel's contempt, both for
the losers at the bar he's left behind in his stellar schlock stardom
and for the "entertainer-loser" (the proto-B.J.) who plays for them.
Even the self-contempt he imputes to the "piano man" rings false.
"Captain Jack": Loser dresses up in poseur clothes and masturbates and
shoots up heroin and is an all-around phony in the eyes of the
songwriter who is so, so superior to him.
"The Entertainer": Entertainers are phonies! Except exquisitely
self-aware entertainers like B.J., who let you in on this secret.
(Compare The Band's beautiful, subtle tribute to Dylan's entertainer
insecurities in "Stage Fright." I love the line in that song, "he got
caught in the spotlight": such a haunting image of a shy entertainer.)
"Say Goodbye to Hollywood." Hollywood is phony! Who knew? God, doesn't
B.J. ever get tired of showing us how phony the phonies of this phony
world are? Could someone let B.J. know he's phoning it in with all
this phoniness at this point? Isn't there something, well, a bit phony
about his hysteria over phoniness?
He can't even celebrate his "New York State of Mind" without
displaying his oh-so-rebellious contempt for "the movie stars in their
fancy cars and their limousines." You think Billy Joel has really
never ridden in a limo?
"The Stranger": This is B.J. lifting that great Beatles line about
Eleanor Rigby putting on "the face that she keeps by the door." You
should see the heavy-handed mask featured on the expensive two-disc
"legacy" reissue of "The Stranger" album. So deep! Yes, B.J., you've
nailed it: We're all phonies hiding our true faces! Everyone wears a
mask! Who woulda known it without B.J. to tell us?
"Scenes From an Italian Restaurant": I can't stand it, but at least
this is one of B.J.'s tributes to "the little people" that although
it's annoying and clichid to the max doesn't completely hold its
characters in contempt.
"Anthony's Song" straight up contempt for lower-middle-class
aspirations. B.J.'s down with the authentic shit in life. This is the
one with the line about the "heart attack-ack-ack" where he
attack-ack-acks people who work two jobs so they can "trade in their
Chevy for a Cadillac"-ack-ack, something B.J. would never do. No phony
"movin' up" for him!
"Only the Good Die Young": Contempt for the Catholic religion. I know:
It's spirited if anti-spiritual, but, still ... I've heard some
Catholic girls opine on its most famous line ("Catholic girls start
much too late"), and they ain't buyin' it. B.J. is no James Joyce.
"She's Always a Woman": First, has there ever been a more blatant or
blatantly inept case of attempted artistic theft than "She's Always a
Woman"? It's such a lame imitation of Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman."
(B.J.'s woman "hides like a child" where Dylan's "breaks just like a
little girl.") B.J.'s woman also: is prone to "casual lies," "steals
like a thief," "takes care of herself," and "carelessly cuts you and
laughs ..." Poor B.J., recycling every misogynist clichi in the book.
At this point, reader, perhaps you have some questions for me about
this tirade? Fair enough.
What right do you have to criticize such a popular artist? Aren't you
just being elitist?
No, you don't understand: Billy's from my 'hood, mid-Long
Island Hicksville, to be precise (I'm from Bay Shore) so I'm sensitive
to his abuse of our common roots. Once I wrote something about the
curse of being from the Guyland. In it I said something heartfelt: New
Jersey may have a rep as a toxic dump for mob victims to fester in,
but at least it brought forth Bruce Springsteen. The ultimate Guyland
humiliation is to be repped to the world by Billy Joel. So I feel
entitled to be cruel may I continue?
OK. But isn't there anything you like?
Fair question. I've always liked "The Longest Time" and "An Innocent
Man." May I get back to the contemptible crap?
OK, but focus.
Well, I really can't stand the "man of the people" stuff. Like
"Allentown" and "The Downeaster 'Alexa.' " Yeah, he's a real working
man, that B.J. Sure, other artists strike that pose, but somehow with
B.J. the strain of his pretension is just too much to bear.
What else? What if you had to choose one song as the epitome of B.J. badness?
OK, I think it would have to be "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me."
Why?
It shows how completely, totally clueless Billy Joel is. It suggests
he wrote it because he thought people regarded him as an outmoded
relic because he doesn't wear the right hip-signifier clothes. That
it's a matter of his wide ties vs. New Wave skinny ties, that it's
because his car doesn't have white-wall tires or because he doesn't
dress "like a Beau Brummell" or hang out with the right crowd or look
like Elvis Costello.
He thinks people can't stand him because he dresses wrong or doesn't look
right.
Billy Joel, they can't stand you because of your music; because of
your stupid, smug attitude; because of the way you ripped off your
betters to produce music that rarely reaches the level even of
mediocrity. You could dress completely au courant and people would
still loathe your lame lyrics.
It's not that they dislike anything exterior about you. They dislike
you because of who you really are inside. They dislike you for being
you. At a certain point, consistent, aggressive badness justifies
profound hostility. They hate you just the way you are.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.