Frothy Paradise

“There’s always the chance we’ll see another of those ‘career re-evaluation”’ essays that places like the New York Times Sunday ‘Arts & Leisure’ section are fond of running about the Barry Manilows of the world. The kind of piece in which we’d discover that Billy’s actually ‘gritty,’ ‘unfairly marginalized’ by hipsters; that his work is profoundly expressive of late-20th-century alienation (‘Captain Jack’); that his hackneyed, misogynist hymns to love are actually filled with sophisticated erotic angst; that his ‘distillations of disillusion,’ to use the patois of such pieces, over the artist’s role (‘Piano Man,’ ‘The Entertainer,’ ‘Say Goodbye to Hollywood,’ etc.) are in fact ‘preternaturally self-conscious,’ not just shallow, Holden Caulfield-esque denunciations of ‘phonies,’ but mentionable in the same breath as works by great artists.

This must be prevented! No career re-evaluations please! No false contrarian rehabilitations! He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. Joel’s famous song ‘It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me’? Please. It never was rock ‘n’ roll. Billy Joel’s music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: ‘Mock-Rock’…”

Thank you, Ron Rosenbaum, for kicking Billy Joel so solidly in the balls that I take it no one will feel compelled to play his music, listen to his music, talk about his music, or even refer to him in any way again, ever.