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There was a time when I was slightly embarrassed to tell people that my favourite singer was Billy Joel. That time was roughly 1994, when I was acutely aware that Billy Joel was an incredibly uncool artist to enjoy. Of course, after I did my research I realised that Billy Joel had always been an incredibly uncool artist to enjoy, even when he was ruling the top of the charts. That has been the fate to which the world has condemned William Martin Joel: a life of selling millions of records and filling stadiums around the world, while never managing to be cool.
This only goes to show that the popular view of what’s cool and uncool is all a load of bollocks because Billy Joel is cool. He’s awesome. He’s brilliant. To quote another man who was nifty with a tune, he’s the Nile, he’s the Tower of Pisa, he’s the smile on the Mona Lisa. Sadly, for decades people like me have been made to feel reluctant to admit these obvious truths, because of the tyranny of the tastemakers.
It’s time to face facts, Billy Joel is cool.
I blame Just The Way You Are. That syrupy lounge ditty, dashed off in tribute to Joel’s first wife, which the man himself didn’t really think was good enough to release, became a massive hit, covered by wedding bands around the world, and cemented an image in many people’s minds that Billy Joel was nothing but a purveyor of cliched sap.
I assure you, as a connoisseur and a scholar of Joelology, nothing could be further from the truth. For the writer of Just The Way You Are is also the writer of She’s Got A Way, as gorgeous and tender a love ballad as was ever sung. When it comes to love songs, Billy has every angle covered, from the exuberant first-blush joy of The Longest Time and Uptown Girl to Summer Highland Falls, a beautifully bruised meditation on love gone cold that ranks as one of the all-time great break-up songs.
But even thinking of Billy Joel as just a love-song merchant would be woefully misguided. Two years before Bruce Springsteen conquered the globe with Born in the USA, Billy was paying his own tribute to the Vietnam vets that America turned its back on, in Goodnight Saigon. On the same album was Allentown, a protest song sticking up for the workers who had been chewed up and spat out by the American Dream. Billy was always on the side of the little guy: The Downeaster Alexa to Movin’ Out to Scenes From An Italian Restaurant to Half A Mile Away, he chronicled the lives and loves and joys and sorrows of ordinary Americans, working-class people who he understood because he was one of them.
He never got credit for that, of course. Critics have steadfastly refused to give Billy Joel credit for anything much. Not that he ever thought much of critics either. They hammered him for It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll To Me, seeing it as an attack on their preening profession – which it was.
Maybe it’s because Billy always sang a bit too sweetly, crafted melodies a bit too smooth, tinkled the ivories a little too prettily, to gain street cred. Working-class heroes aren’t supposed to sound pretty – Billy wasn’t rough-hewn enough. On the other hand, he wasn’t weird enough to be an icon either: while his fellow short pudgy piano man Elton John draped himself in extravagant rock-star accoutrements and played the surrealist aristocrat to the hilt, Billy just wore jeans and a T-shirt, turned up and put on a good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll show.
It’s a hell of a show he puts on, too. I’ve seen Billy Joel live four times, and every time he and his band blew the roof off the place. The great beauty of a Billy Joel concert is that if you like his old stuff better than his new stuff…there is no new stuff. In 1992, at the age of 43, Billy put out River of Dreams, which would be his last rock album. Since then, he’s dedicated himself to composing classical music and film scores, and blasting out his two decades of hits to the millions of fans who continue to infuriate critics by loving every minute of it.
I think everyone knows Billy Joel is a genius, really. Everyone sings along to his songs when they hear them, even if it’s only inside their own heads. We all know how many stone-cold bangers he’s given us. I’m here to say: it’s OK to say so. It’s OK to say that bringing joy to the world with beautiful songs is actually a great way to spend your life.
And it’s OK to say that a short, squashed-nosed, bug-eyed, Jewish kid from the poorest part of Hicksville, Long Island, growing up to become a multi-millionaire because he has a nice ear for a tune and his mother had the foresight to get him piano lessons…that is really bloody cool.
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