Sing us a Song

You're right, Ron, this is an odd moment to bring up Billy Joel.

Ron Rosenbaum has a take-down of Billy Joel in Slate. Rosenbaum seems to focus mostly on Billy Joel's ever-present contempt for "phoniness" and the fact that it can't obscure that he himself, Billy Joel, is a phony. Rosenbaum takes particular issue with Joel's apparently unconvincing defenses of the authenticity of the workingman's experience, though this is complicated by the fact that Rosenbaum also finds the time to praise Bruce Springsteen, for whom a similar criticism could be easily made.

Anyway, I don't really have a dog in this fight. But I do like these little polemics when they show up in the popular press. (Another classic example is this piece by Jon Pareles about Coldplay.) As Rosenbaum rightly points out, the opposite kind of article is far more common to encounter.

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-20^th-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.

(Indeed Chuck Klosterman has a piece exactly like this about Billy Joel, which I'm sort of surprised Rosenbaum didn't mention.)

Also interesting for me is that there is NO MENTION AT ALL of musical setting (arrangement, solos, melodies, rhythms, tunes) in this article. Rosenbaum only finds the time to criticize Joel for his lyrics. You could have almost forgot that Joel is a musician and that his music might be a worthwhile thing to look at when making a broadsided rant against his artistic worth. But then again, that's just me speaking as a musician and ethnomusicologist. What's the chorus of his most popular song, anyway? Is it "Tell us a story, you're the poet"?