BILLY JOEL, THE DONALD TRUMP OF POP MUSIC?
“I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free,” James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time. “Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels.”
James Baldwin was right. I know, because I saw the great American nightmare—the vapid confusion, the spiritual decay—in Madison Square Garden last week. Its name was Billy Joel.
The singer’s profound awfulness is hardly news. Ron Rosenbaum was being charitable when he crowned Joel “the worst pop singer ever,” and I myself have spent more time than an emotionally stable person should musing about Joel’s solipsistic and soulless schlock. And I might’ve let him walk gently into the good night if my friend and former Tablet colleague Adam Chandler hadn’t enticed me to go and behold Joel in person, and if that concert hadn’t taken place just a month after the inauguration of Donald John Trump to the presidency of the United States of America, and if I didn’t come to believe, cowering in the arena among the mid-aged boppers who were there to give “Uptown Girl” one more stroll down memory lane, that Billy Joel is not an individual artist but a symptom of more or less everything that is wrong with America today.
Really? Joel has an impressive back catalog of hit songs, and enough adoring fans to buy tickets and fill up sports arenas, so it seems like an equitable transaction between pop artist and consumer. Tablet has run some excellent articles, but this piece attacks the hapless Joel — and his fans — with a chainsaw. As with the millions of gallons of ink from sniffy “Not Our Class, Dear” elites who have slagged the other fellow namechecked in its headline (dating back at least to the Spy magazine days of the 1980s), it’s giving me strange new respect to an artist I’ve never really cared much for, beyond the occasional well-crafted song such as “Pressure” and “My Life.”