Billy Joel has sold more than 150 million albums worldwide.
He set the record for sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden—12,
two more than runner-up Bruce Springsteen—and had 13 Top 10 hits
and 11 Top 10 albums. His songs are radio mainstays and his tours gross
millions of dollars. But nobody cares about Billy Joel—nobody who
matters, anyway.
The un-ironic indie embrace of ’70s and ’80s pop icons extends to
Bruce Springsteen and Elton John, but shirks Billy Joel. Between the
two of them, Springsteen (Joel’s thematic cousin) and John (his recent
tour partner) have 31 Top 10 albums and 29 Top 10 songs, but their
mega-moneyed mega-stardom doesn’t supersede the Rolling Stone covers and Pitchfork column space that Joel is denied.
Springsteen swaps songs with Arcade Fire and hangs out with the Hold
Steady. Elton John performs with Scissor Sisters. Joel is covered by…
Garth Brooks. Nobody’s name checking him in interviews and he’s not
cited as an influence on anyone of consequence. (The Fray? Ugh.) It’s
not that music lovers badmouth him, it’s that they don’t talk about him
at all. In the first 15 years of his career, Joel made a slew of truly
great, instantly recognized pop songs—as smart, streetwise, and
gutsy as any of Springsteen’s early material. But outside the
mainstream, he’s stigmatized like some kind of ivory-tickling
Sting.
In 1986, around the time of Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume
II (the sixth-bestselling album of all time, BTW), Billy
Joel was my first musical love (the Fat Boys were more of a crush).
Summer camp provided the introduction and the setting for a full-blown
romance with his music, though much of the Catholic-knocking
socio-sexual nuance of “Only the Good Die Young” was lost on my Jewish
11-year-old ears. Still, hormonal adolescence proved the perfect lens
through which to appreciate Joel’s suburban-kid-living-in-the-big-city
narratives. The love affair lasted into high school, when the Storm
Front Tour became the first concert I ever attended after my mom
and I spent the night in front of an Eckerd Drugs in West Palm Beach,
Florida, to buy tickets. Then I went to college and started smoking
pot. From that point on, nothing: Billy Joel didn’t fit into grown-up
life.
Talking to friends and colleagues about this story, I learned that
many people my age had an early period of Joel appreciation
(surprising), though nobody’s rocking Glass Houses on their
iTunes (not surprising). Those old songs are still
good—hook-heavy pop rock delivered with schoolboy
conviction—but they’re impossible to relate to as an adult. In
“Piano Man,” all I can hear is my pubescent self, singing along with
the rest of my cabin-mates on a humid summer afternoon. Hits like “You
May Be Right” and “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” are clever and brash
but bratty, simplistic—best left for random radio sing-a-longs
or, better yet, karaoke. Even “Captain Jack”—a longtime fan
favorite, and Joel’s grittiest portrayal of urban white-boy
angst—feels stunted. The song’s emotional scope is broad but
ultimately shallow, like teen-dom itself.
With 1982’s The Nylon Curtain, Joel started growing up.
“Allentown” and “Goodnight Saigon” left behind coming-of-age storylines
in favor of broader social statements that aspired to—but didn’t
quite achieve—zeitgeist consequence. An Innocent Man followed with its doo-wop/wall-of-sound revivalism. The Bridge featured the senior prom–ready “This Is the Time.” With each
album, Joel heavy-handedly announced his artistic intent: an “issues
album,” an “homage album,” and a “recovery album.” Joel shed his boyish
conviction for a manly righteousness that didn’t fit, as well. And then
came “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
Joel’s second-most-famous song bleach-ed any potential cred out of
his legacy once and for all. In hindsight, it plays like a Googling of
the phrase “baby boomer American history”—like “Captain Jack,”
it’s a willfully shallow survey of personal experience, nostalgia set
to the most insidious chorus ever. With that song, Joel leaped over the
hill, turning the highlights of his early life—his previous stock
in trade—into a neatly rhymed montage. Back in ’89, my mom
explained every reference, lesson-like, and I was actually interested.
Now I’m just annoyed.
Springsteen sings about adults with sympathy, minus melodrama:
That’s what makes him a mentor for cusp-of-adulthood indie rockers.
Couched in camp, Elton John has always countered sentimentalism with a
sense of humor, a knowing, self-effacing dualism that modern acts
aspire to, but rarely achieve. Joel never got there, in depth or in
irony. He worked best when we were kids.