You May Be Wrong
How good or bad changes depending on where we are in life
Almost three weeks ago, the New York Times published their list of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters. I subsequently watched, somewhat detachedly, as folks I know and didn’t know reacted with the usual vitriol and indignation over who made the cut and who didn’t. I thought the furor would soon subside, until I realized the topic was far too juicy to die a quiet death.
Seems like practically every media outlet jumped on this generally harmless story like feral cats to an open can of tuna in an alley by a dumpster. Not surprisingly, it got kicked up the ladder to the current arbiter of who’s musically kosher or not, Rick Beato, to extract even more marrow from that timeless bone. As I opened my inbox this morning, I saw my friend and fellow Sub-stacker, Gary Gold, (who’s writing I always enjoy and recommend checking out), also wrote a missive on it.
One of the least surprising aftershocks from said NYT article, was the perennial slagging of Billy Joel’s songwriting ability. It reminded me of a missive I wrote on Joel almost a year ago after watching his HBO documentary released around the same time.
My Substack page is normally home to topics often music adjacent but not music focused per se. In the wake of this renewed greatest/not greatest songwriter debate, (admittedly close to my heart), I’m sharing last year’s piece, updated, as it still connects to my greater purpose here; exploring what makes us who we are and (hopefully) fostering choice around how that manifests. My current jag on the soul eroding effects of late-stage capitalism takes a backseat this week to our old oft beloved, oft maligned friend, the Piano Man himself.
As a kid and young person I was often drawn to less popular music because I thought I was somehow special and different from the rest of society. They loved Billy Joel, Cat Stevens, Gordon Lightfoot, Jim Croce and on and on and on.
I mocked those artists and listened to my “snob” music; jazz, classical and fusion… feeling smug and superior. It self justified my belonging to a world that had to pay a higher price for its specialness. Much of that music is exceptionally impressive and satisfying, especially by rhythmic/harmonic standards. I found shelter in that but missed out on troves of enjoyable pop music because of a bias I attached to an identity. One created to cope with a life I didn’t fully understand or necessarily want. It often takes time to realize the life you’re given is not the life you have to keep.
Decades later, I’ve become quite the regular guy, at least by Buddhist standards. Hirings, firings, marriage, kids, divorce, sickness, family deaths, etc. Along the way, I awoke one morning and no longer needed to feel superior to my fellows in that particular vein. I’m still working on recovering from that presentation in other areas.
Today I can listen to those great artists I used to mock, and laugh at how important it was for me to dismiss them, all in the name of coolness. It was my loss, depriving myself of the pleasure of those wonderful songs.
On some level, I’m still a snob. Loving heaps of music a lot of the world doesn’t care for, but no longer at the exclusion of music for the masses. Today a friend will recommend something from a mainstream artist and I can listen with an open mind. That would’ve been impossible years ago. But there’s a few I’ve always struggled to approve of.
There’s this old joke.
Billy Joel: Best shitty songwriter of all time, or shittiest best songwriter of all time?
Years ago, I stumbled onto this article, taking the debate even further:
https://slate.com/.../the-awfulness-of-billy-joel...
My inner music snob certainly felt vindicated reading it. But what of the rest of me?
Like many of us, during Covid, I had unexpected time to re-evaluate a lot of things. I returned to the music of my youth with a different ear. I used to only listen with my mind. A reason why Steely Dan was so important to me as a younger person.
They still are, but for entirely different reasons…
Billy Joel? So easy to knock. Always struck me as a bridge and tunnel schnook. A schlocky lounge singer cum cloying balladeer with occasional forays into tepid rock.
So easy to mock…
“Don’t go changing”…
That was how I used to see/hear him… over forty years ago.
That life is long gone.
I don’t worry about spending a quarter of my income on albums anymore. Today we all stream music for less than pennies on the dollar, forever and ever, amen.
There’s a devastating downside to that. A long discussion for another missive.
In recent years I’ve been revisiting Joel’s catalogue in its entirety. Something I simply couldn’t afford to do growing up.
He was never an “important” enough artist for me to spend that much money on. Not when I could count on hearing a serviceable single from him every few years, free of charge on the radio.
Pity.
I never got to hear the deeper cuts, the ones that have come to change my opinion about his artistry.
Short answer: Joel’s music is surprisingly deep and wonderful.
He was so good at playing the survival game. He managed to serve the public middle of the road, easy to digest ear candy for years. Little did I realize, he was simultaneously filling the rest of his albums with much more musically interesting and ambitious moments.
Now I’m hearing those moments. Beautiful and touching.
If you’re only casually familiar, I recommend “52nd Street” as the gateway to a deeper Joel experience. That album is top loaded with radio staples (Big Shot, My Life) and then unfurls into what Spinal Tap called a “Jazz Odyssey”, but in the most delightful way. Fun, gorgeous, ambitious and pretty liberated for a guy who could’ve just stuck to a hit record formula through and through.
I had to commit this opinion to writing before I changed my fickle, overly educated mind, which always says; keep the guilty pleasures to yourself. Another part of me doesn’t want to deprive my other overly educated friends of some potentially satisfying musical experiences. As a recovering music snob later in life, I can now metabolize music using less of my rigid intellect and more of my open heart and sturdy soul.
Through that lens, it’s easier to see how Billy Joel carved out his own real estate. Musical landscapes where the deeply personal and massively accessible somehow meet peacefully. To my heart and soul, it’s absolutely wonderful. Somewhere between the everyman mythology of Springsteen and the all together now sing-along infectiousness of Elton John.
Which is why I enjoyed the HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, immensely. It was a powerful reminder that fate has a plan for all of us. There can only be one Billy Joel. So many years, so many songs, woven into the very fabric of our collective and personal culture.
But I suspect I wasn’t the only musician watching that doc and comparing themselves to him. I’ll admit I’ve lost my fair share of sleep over the years asking whatever force that created me; why didn’t life turn out the way I’d hoped? Why didn’t I become the next Billy Joel?
Why would I want to be the next Billy Joel when for years I wrote him off as the ultimate schmaltzy balladeer cum tepid bridge and tunnel rocker?
That opinion was the privilege of a sheltered young man, enjoying a world where quality artistic output was typical and seemingly endless. A society that took the Joels, Springsteens and Dylans for granted. Along with all the other treasures. A vast array of musical giants astoundingly churning out what would one day be recognized as one classic after another.
Why do we even like something or someone, anyway? This was the question going through my mind as I watched his documentary. A question that goes through my mind often.
In the early eighties, I was a budding singer/songwriter, imitating the popular troubadours of the day. Especially those loved by the masses. Society, in all its concentric circles (family, friends, industry, marketplace) touts certain artists as good or great, while others are labeled as not good or simply bad. Naturally, many young people look to the popular models for direction.
I was, for better or worse, raised in a community of musicians who saw themselves as elite. Billy Joel was considered a singer/songwriter strictly for the plebeian population. Still, I couldn’t help being intrigued by those who peddled the popular song. I was only a boy, after all. In my house, Stravinsky and Coltrane were the standard and yet, I couldn’t stop from being drawn into the more saccharine melodies and sentimental poetry/prose of that more artistically crass group of people known as “entertainers”.
By his own admission, Joel was one of those. Where I came from, an artist like that could only ever be a guilty pleasure at best and a shameful digression at worst.
Time and tide will of course, eradicate all supposed absolutes. I remember when Democrats bemoaned the era of former matinee idol turned politician Reagan as the worst thing that could happen to a country with a strong middle class, just as Republicans had cringed at the coming of Carter, a peanut farmer prince, supposedly hell bent on dismantling all the hard earned rewards the post war generation held sacred. Time and tide allow for perception and perspective to shift. Today, one can’t help but wonder if Carter and Reagan still look like the bellwethers of disaster critics believed or just central casting characters from a simpler time, who’s ways of moving through the world seem far less offensive by today’s social media standards.
For many recovering music snobs, Billy Joel no longer comes off as the wanna be real deal poseur he was often accused of being in the 70s & 80s. On the contrary, in the vast musical/cultural desert many of us older folks find ourselves presently in, we now cling to Joel like Indy and Marion did to one another when the Ark was opened, revealing not the face of almighty God, but merely a gilded and tricky trove, full of dark and deadly demons.
It’s our context that assigns art’s metric as much as it is the art itself. Thus, it’s practically impossible for me to know if Joel’s music is objectively good or bad. I could certainly give a professorial critique/praise of Joel’s music. Through that lens, his artistic output is both shockingly derivative and formulaic musically. While it’s true he sat on the shoulders of the foundational giants he pilfered from, he deftly mixed that with his innate artistic and musical abilities, producing some of the most surprisingly sophisticated, melodic, and harmonic ideas ever cleverly packaged in bite-size aural confections. Songs that go down pretty easy for both those with golden and tin ears.
Lyrically, Joel can easily be judged as a sentimental and low hanging topical fruit farmer. But he also consistently reveals a surprisingly candid personality of the most confessional and vulnerable type. Often arriving at simple but very, very pithy truths.
“She’s always a woman to me.”
“You may be right, I may be crazy.”
“I don’t care what you say anymore, this is my life.”
Are these the timeless maxims of a poet laureate or the guy sitting next to you at the bar?
Perhaps a bit of both.
But even that summation is subjective. What is more certain; His music is baked into so many of our own life experiences on such a personal level that sizing it up in any impartial way is virtually impossible.
It also bears mentioning that good and bad can be assigned to the same things, depending on how contexts change. As a boy, I hated the taste of coffee. Today I love it (if it’s a good cup).
Coffee didn’t change, I did!
Today, a song like “Vienna” is a fucking masterpiece to my weary old soul. Not so much when I first heard it sometime in ‘77 or ‘78 as a little child. Naw. In 78’, the Grease soundtrack was a much better fit for the hyper little boy I was, obsessed with the almost angelic beauty of Olivia Newton John, while my father could only role his artisan eyes in paternal disapproval.
I’m sure dad rolled his eyes at Billy Joel too, while his sometime musical duo partner Steve Khan was playing on Joel’s albums. And who knows what Steve’s dad, Sammy Cahn, thought of his son’s choice to become a Jazz Fusion guitarist with a session man side hustle, and not follow in the footsteps of one who helped provide so many of the words to the soundtrack of a generation of post war, music loving romantics?
These days, Billy Joel is nothing short of real deal musical comfort food. Music so many of us will binge on to mitigate the trauma of living in a world that has in many ways, forgotten those of us over a certain age. Comparatively, his music is rich with melody and harmony. Influenced as much by Beethoven, Mozart and Bach as it was by the Beatles and Doo-Wop. Old school ingredients!
These are the flavors my generation was fed. Harder to come by now. After loosing a frightfully long list of legacy artists these past few years, as much a part of our lives as our own families of origin, a living Billy Joel becomes nothing short of a gratitude miracle.
I wanted to be every bit as impactful as Joel was. I wanted my songs to be the soundtrack of people’s lives. I also wanted to be Lennon, Dylan, Cohen, Cobain, and a boatload of others at one point or another. We can want all day… What we want and what we are? Often not the same. What we hope to be and who we really are might be worlds apart. Sometimes for the worse, hopefully for the better.
But the world doesn’t need another Billy Joel. We’ve already got one. For me, the Joel doc was a sobering reminder; get back to the business of being yourself. The greatest take away? Billy was going to do Billy, come hell or high water. It’s your life, so be yourself and don’t take any shit from anyone. A somewhat oversimplification of how to deal with life’s vicissitudes, but something to aspire to, nonetheless.
Today I find that Joel’s songs, singing, and recordings, are by and large, great. In small doses, anyway. Are they great like a filet mignon or a Big Mac? The distinction is somewhat moot. Joel’s was the food we were all fed, thus, it satisfies us.
There’s the beef.
The greater test: Will Joel’s music still be revered and celebrated fifty to a hundred years from now? Also moot, as few if any of us will be around to know the answer.
As we age we’re truly lucky if we can learn to accept and love all parts of ourselves. The ones who suffer the most are those that can’t make peace with all they truly are. At this point, to disown Billy Joel is to disown a part of each of us.
So don’t go changin’, cause I love all of YOU, just the way you are.
Great piece! I have some Mike stories re Billy Joel. There is a fart tape involved, but it's mostly laughing.
Fun read - Thx Jules. Can't wait for you to decipher Steely Dan and its illusory lyrics.