Nowadays you can’t be too sentimental.
Originally written February 2015. New stuff soon.
I have a complicated relationship with Billy Joel’s music. He’s from Long Island and I’m an outer-borough gal, and he was always a presence on the rock station WNEW-FM in the formative years of my ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. But unlike other local heroes who projected an air of CB’s/Mudd Club cool, Joel stood out as that kid who was trying too hard to dazzle at the school talent show, to please the relatives with his recital of the Torah portion at his bar mitzvah (I don’t even know if he had one), and to play the tough greaser kid from the block.
Even with his undeniable gift for melody, he came off as really arrogant. Not that he’s the first arrogant rock star, or that a lack of humility is a deal-breaker for me. There are many arrogant rock stars I admire, but when the dickish behavior is tied in with traits I recognize in myself — an eagerness to please compounded with a classicist’s pretentiousness and an insistence on playing up negligible street cred — it hits too close to home, emotionally and geographically.
This complicated relationship doesn’t all stem from self-hatred, though. I quite enjoy many art-rockers and singer-songwriters from those eras. Compositionally, Steely Dan aren’t terribly different from Billy Joel, and the Jersey-bred Donald Fagen probably has some of the same personality quirks as his bridge-and-tunnel neighbor Joel. But it comes down to fundamentals: the Dan are students of Dylan, Duke Ellington, Ennio Morricone, Leiber & Stoller.
Billy Joel worships Paul McCartney, the woodshedding stoner uncle to be sure, but also the impenitent Pop Guy. I acknowledge his immense influence, and yet as restless and experimental as he could be, his propensity for schmaltz means it’s a body of work I’m fascinated by rather than in love with.
Joel has a great ear for picking up Macca’s turns of phrase as a composer and arranger, but steals the wrong tropes from the Beatle, too. There’s that, and Joel’s ’70s image of the sadsack troubadour spitting darts, which Tom Waits was funnier at and Harry Chapin was bleaker at and Todd Rundgren did more flamboyantly. Occasionally, when Joel’s in Tin Pan Alley mode, as in “Don’t Ask Me Why,” he recalls Beatles associate Harry Nilsson, although he lacks Nilsson’s fearlessness about dissolving into a song’s ether or pushing it to its manic margin (1982’s “Pressure” is the closest Joel has come to accomplishing the latter).
“It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” comes to us via Billy Joel’s 1980 album Glass Houses, where he wrestles with punk and new wave the way I wrestle with Joel and the Beatles. I’m supportive of artists working out their feelings in public, knowing that their opinions might change over the course of the recording sessions, or that their initial word on a matter might not be their final word.
Indeed, Joel seemed to ease into being an ’80s Top 40 fixture as the Reagan years rolled on and the money rolled in, but perhaps, in 1980, he had doubts. The Glass Houses LP cover art has him throwing a stone into the voluminous glass that festooned his luxury house in Oyster Bay at the time, and one can read that as a comment on the fragility of fame and wealth and how easily it can all break apart, or a side-eye to his critics, who have made the mistake of being as persnickety as Billy Joel but without the blessed fortune of being Billy Joel.
“Rock and Roll” lets Joel have his cake and eat it too: he gets to complain about how silly skinny-tie culture is via an ambiguous narrative in which he doesn’t change up the voices in the back and forth between speaker and respondent. Is he speaking to his handler or himself? Is it unqualified cynicism or a dialogue between self-states as he straddles generations? He gets to dress in a snazzy red jacket and geometric-patterned tie on the single art with punky diagonal lettering, and he gets to pay lip service to “new wave” in a danceable, chart-friendly song, while belittling the intelligence of “the average teen” and the déclassé trend-hopping of Johnnys-come-lately who “dress trashy.” I assume that while he was writing and recording this, he was working out in his head whether or not he meant it to be subversive, a pop song with a dark, anti-industry message. I can’t tell whether it’s that or just confusion from a reactionary Angry Young Man who’s beginning to get older.
In a way, it has a similar rockist tentativeness to Bad Company’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy,” which tries to plant that dinosaur flag even as it attempts a disco sellout, but refuses to commit to a steady dance beat because it’s easier to take shelter in the swaggering riffs of the chorus than stick with the real, functional work of the rhythm. “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy” is Bad Company winking and nudging at the club-readiness of the emergent youth culture, with its girls and Blacks and gays and intersections thereof, while reassuring those kids’ white, cishet, male counterparts that the song isn’t really for the discotheque — it’s for the arena tailgate party and the parking lot of a suburban 7-Eleven. I wouldn’t call either song an outright failure; they’re both engaging in their equivocation. But I do reserve the right to wonder whose side the artists are on, ultimately.
For guidance on “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” Joel retreats to the dime-store jukebox of the ’50s and early ’60s, of school dances and Frankie Valli, and he’s safe because squaresville Middle America in the late ’70s was taking comfort in Grease and Happy Days, and they could all sigh a collective wistful sigh at their rose-tinted nostalgia. The groundwork had already been laid for him to be an old codger. The same year “Rock and Roll” came out, Joel’s hero McCartney, who’d been futzing with modern synthesizers and sequencers like the ARP and the Yamaha CS-80, released McCartney II, which featured the sweetly baffling electronic track “Temporary Secretary.”
Fast forward to 2015, and while Billy Joel sells out Madison Square Garden with greatest-hits sets and composes dubious classical music, Paul McCartney is recording with Kanye and Rihanna. Macca’s voice has lost some power and I’m not sure he can still write, but it’s to his credit that he was always forward-looking, as were the Beatles. Billy Joel could stand to interpolate some of that mindset instead of just the chord progressions.
