I am a man of omnivorous music taste. Line some of my favorite musicians and songs together and they don’t make sense next to each other. Crass. Simon & Garfunkel. Black Sabbath. Joni Mitchell. Pulp. The Clash. Emmylou Harris. ‘60s garage rock. Against Me. Songs: Ohia. Springsteen. Prince.
Right now my Spotify On Repeat is “Real Death” by Mount Eerie, “The Living Years” by Mike + the Mechanics, “31 Seasons in the Minor League” by Magnolia Electric Company, “All My Happiness is Gone” by Purple Mountains and “Blue Factory Flame” by Songs: Ohia. Lyle Lovett is somewhere on there next to Los Angeles punk pioneers X. Nanci Griffith is there with Tears for Fears. I’ve been mainlining PJ Harvey and Mitski, but also listening to a playlist full of full-bodied FM classics. Father John Misty is on a “rewind” playlist along with Cher, Negativland and The Grateful Dead. I can bust out a Ghostface Killah lyric when the time is right, but I like to cap off some nights with Otis Redding. It’s all the fragments of a record store that exploded, scattering debris instead of a unified aesthetic that eschews certain bits of “authenticity” and just lets the mood strike me for what I’d like, and sometimes what I like is weird early Moog music. I’ve been in nasty punk basements watching White Lung scream it all out, but I’ve also seen a reunited Van Halen at an outdoor venue.
What this omnivorous taste means is that I don’t engage much with music I dislike. I don’t even really shit on the artists I dislike. Hating Nickelback (I don’t like them in particular) is just a shorthand often for a kind of “must hate” attitude. A lazy joke. There are certainly artists I avoid, I just don’t make a habit out of dwelling on them, which is kind of hilarious given that I am, at times, deeply misanthropic. I’m not going to dwell much on my distaste for James Taylor. It’s boring. I’d rather get excited about a musician I love. Like Jandek, The Residents or Jimi Hendrix. All music — underground or everywhere — has its place for me.
But there’s an artist who has stuck in my craw of lately in a way that makes me cringe. And I don’t think it’s his music so much as a certain attitude.
I am talking about Billy Joel.
Billy Joel, as I’ve observed, has just a few modes. There is the unremarkable nostalgist, channeling 50s and 60s rock in “Uptown Girl,” “The Longest Time” or, as highlighted in my current favorite column (Stereogum’s The Number Ones), “Tell Her About It.”
There’s the kind of sentimentality that makes rock so soft it would make the Barry Manilows of the world blush. “Just the Way You Are” is a song that cultivates Billy Joel as some kind of romantic. But some of those have retrograde undertones. “She’s Always a Woman” seems like a love song, but really reflects on the bad qualities of the woman discussed in the song as if he’s just looking past “Yeah she steals like a thief but she's always a woman to me.” It’s a tone we’ll get to momentarily, but it also feels like I should lump “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” into the sentimentality, in the sense that he projects an affinity with a famous outlaw with his own existence.
But let’s go back to “She’s Always a Woman” for a second. Because the song, ostensibly a love song, actually rips the woman apart, reflecting on mostly her negative qualities.
And it’s because Billy Joel is a fucking scold.
I think the biggest example of this is “Big Shot,” a song that has the anger and sneer of a punk song if all the punks had been in their 40s at the outset and were really into Frankie Valli instead of The Stooges. There’s a contempt for wealth (ironic given that Joel himself is not a man without money) but it comes across, as much as anything, as a sort of resentment rather than a challenge to the status quo:
Well, you went uptown riding in your limousine
With your fine Park Avenue clothes
You had the Dom Perignon in your hand
And the spoon up your nose
And when you wake up in the morning
With your head on fire
And your eyes too bloody to see
Go on and cry in your coffee
But don't come bitchin' to me
Honestly, it’s not that far from “Uptown Girl” in some ways, reflecting on a class dynamic that sneers at largess but also vies for it in some ways. It’s sort of an underdog theme that permeates “New York State of Mind,” though perhaps it’s a little more subtle, mixing in nostalgia to create something close to wistful.
“Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” is another example. Angry. Scolding. Calling out the strivers, as if scrappy and hard-scrabble should be the only way to exist. Even a smooth song with nostalgia like “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” has an undertone of “There’s really nothing new under the sun.” It could be interpreted to say, possibly, “Music is music and music is great” or it could be “all this new crap sucks, why not stick with the GOOD stuff.”
Perhaps one of his biggest songs is among his most scolding. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” has lyrics that are more or less a hodge-podge of free association. It’s a song literally written to tell kids of the 80s they didn’t even know what it was like to grow up in the turbulent 50s and 60s. And also to get off his lawn.
In “Captain Jack,” he narrowly focuses on one character with a mix of disdain, pity and possibly a glimmer of sympathy. Of course, it also talks about the griminess of the people of New York at the time with “So you go to the village in your tie dyed jeans, And you stare at the junkies and the closet queens, It's like some pornographic magazine.” It also managed to get the word “masturbate” on the radio with the lyrics, “Your sister's gone out, she's on a date, You just sit at home and masturbate.” Basically, the character escapes into drugs. Joel seems disdainful of each decision, but also reflects that he knows the character in question feels like they’re slipping into despair.
It’s an energy that goes just a little bit into “Piano Man,” a song of a skids row of bar patrons hanging on to whatever the musician will play for them. Are the characters being shown sympathy? Is it misanthropy? Who knows! The piano man himself was reportedly Joel, so perhaps it was observational that gradually curdled. (“Piano Man” and “Captain Jack” are on the same album.)
I can’t say I entirely hate Billy Joel. “You May Be Right” is a banger. It’s caustic, certainly, but in the right ways. And some of these songs I listed I rather like, including “Captain Jack.” But once you realize Billy Joel songs only have a few bins they can go in, unlike, say, a Bob Dylan, a Joni Mitchell, a Paul Simon or a Daniel Johnston, the songs seem to wear a little thin, especially as Joel transitioned out of singing about the every-man and became among the rich he so disdained. And maybe some of the anger he displayed was inward metastasizing outward.
Regardless, it creates an artist whose problem isn’t his composition or his lyrical composition, but boils down to his entire attitude. I certainly have my fair share of musical misanthropists I adore. Warren Zevon is absolutely one of my favorite songwriters. Nihilistic punk has been my jam since 1999, and I never really grew out of it. I still find myself drawn to the music of misery.
But perhaps it’s just that the vibe of Billy Joel is one that’s always about other people and never about Billy Joel himself, and thus every song — no matter how wonderfully composed — has an irksome worldview that will always stand out to me as bothersome, because at the end of the day only once has Billy Joel said “You may be right” in his more popular songs instead of the more usual vibe that he, and only he, is right. And as a messenger of judgment, he has never captured the authority to be the arbiter. He’s the cypher in a corner of music purporting to capture the human experience — but he seems to, at all turns, look down on that experience.
Links
How Choire Sicha Is Steering Style in a Crisis (Study Hall) — A neat little profile of Choire Sicha. The Awl was a delight to write for and Choire edited one of my favorite things I’ve written.
He’s 83, She’s 84, and They Model Other People’s Forgotten Laundry (NYTimes)
The Brutally Funny, Radically Moral World of ‘Letterkenny’ (New York Review of Books) — I love this weird, idiosyncratic little comedy out of Canada.
And since the 51st anniversary of the first crewed Moon landing was in the last few days, let’s all reread the most perfect Clickhole article.
Science
I make a lot of jokes about hating Jupiter (big, overrated, should be destroyed), but do you know what I don’t hate? Jupiter’s moons. Juno, NASA’s current Jupiter mission, had a mishap a few years ago that meant it couldn’t draw itself into its intended orbit around Jupiter, instead flinging itself far out before coming in for a close approach again in a 53 day orbit. That gave it the opportunity to take this gorgeous image of our solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede, which will be visited in a few years by the European Space Agency. That moon — larger than Mercury — has a weird form of ice on it thanks to its interactions with Jupiter, and deep below, could even have an ocean.
Mental health
I’ve been feeling a slow drag of diminishing energy and a heightened sense of anxiety this week. I continue to kind of fumble through my days, and by the end of a workday, feel helplessly anxious. I’m trying to figure out the solution. I’ve also had a few days of just … feeling in the throes of despair. I’m working on changing some things up in my life, but also have been trying to find the energy to do it.
I had an appointment with a new therapist this week. All in all, I feel like it was a good appointment, and that it’s a better fit for what I need right now. I feel like the door is open to talk more in-depth about the things that are bothering me and haunting me already from the first appointment, as if I didn’t need the usual warm-up that comes with some therapists. Hopefully this makes a difference.
No changes in medication.
Jams
I will not be putting a Billy Joel song in here.
Recently, I’ve latched onto the haunting sounds of Laura Marling, so please enjoy “Alexandra.”