This week’s post is an exorcism. Of our shameful, dirty love of Billy Joel hits. They will be excised from our collective psyche through the incantation and recitation of everything that should make us despise Señor Joel but presently fully deny and/or overlook. When this docket is complete we should be fully, irrevocably over Joel and never be caught furtively surveying the full interior of our cars and the intersection in which it sits before we mumble that vocal bass line that fills the negative space in “The Longest Time.” You know the one.

Car Crashes

• These are arguably the hardest to excuse, especially given at least one of them was pretty clearly a DUI sitch. Trees, homes, yards, statues, gardens, trampolines, mailboxes-shaped-like-other-things…you are all in dire effing straits when Mr. Joel wiggles his fob-heavy keychain into the ignition of his 1999 VW Bug and screeches around your late-night Hamptons neighborhood, Ronin-style.

Elton John Osmosis

• Joel’s professional relationship with Elton John makes him more or less fully accountable for everything John does, meaning if Joel would just publicly apologize for all Elton John music since ~1980 we can all move on. John himself is evidently unwilling.

Saxaphones

• They do not belong in white person rock music after 1959. Clemons was grandfathered in but should have been issued a sterner warning to play tambourine as much as possible. Joel seems to have been willingly complicit, often turning the screws by pairing them with lush strings.

Keeping the Faith

• Every nanosecond of this low, low, low, low, low, low-art piece is wrong to the power of “how could we have let this be born?” It boasts a staggering array of atrocities, up to and including:
  • rock star impersonators
  • dancing 50s-era greasers with and without shades
  • Billy Joel dancing
  • Billy Joel gently gracing his own face and boasting about his stolen aftershave
  • Billy Joel in white shoes
  • 100% pointless shots of ladies’ legs
  • the breaking of the 4th wall
  • sexy stenographers
  • one of those old, oblong, golden water carafes
  • Richard Shull literalacting the lyrics
  • the line “found that the dancers still looked tough” played over dancers not looking tough at all
  • the implication that a shark-skinned jacket with a velvet collar is a thing that should exist
  • Christie Brinkley miming
  • Richard Shull clapping along on the downbeat
  • And then when you see the second shoe-shine and you know it’s about to get worse? It does! Joe Piscopo winks directly in your goddamned face!

Super Young Wife

• He’s not the first, nor the last. Still, he married a 23 year-old child when he was 55.

Tossing Rocks

• Still no word on whether he caught that rock or not. He seems preoccupied, so maybe not.

Oh, nevermind.

• Guess he caught it after all.

Uptown Girl

• We maybe don’t have time to inventory this á la “Keeping the Faith.” But a shortlist:
  • Clearly the same greasers from KTF work at Billy’s garage.
  • Billy Joel sings into a wrench
  • the breaking of the 4th wall
  • Brinkley looks and walks in two different directions
  • group dance

We Didn’t Start the Fire

• Oh, boy. This one’s tough. Nominally it’s as if Mad Men was greenlit as a 3.5-minute short film. “Get it all in there, Weiner!” And it is, indeed, all in there. All of it. Aaaaaaaallllll of it! But if you look closely you’ll see two important things emerge:

  • Despite the Gumpian take on American history, that family’s story is a sad progression from the stupid exhuberance of youth to the harsh realities of emotionally disconnected adulthood and the subtle betrayal of the American Dream to magically cure the ills that ail the universal individual.
  • It also explains why probably most American children think Billy Joel was responsible for executing that Viet Cong captain.

Allentown

• Finally we have “Allentown”, the location to which this post will be pinned. First of all, this track draws heavily on random (probably stock) industrial production sound effects. You know, because it’s Allentown. And it kind of feels like the only band to ever get a pass on using sound effects is Waters-era Pink Floyd. Nobody else can be trusted.

But also it’s troubling because it’s basically a Tom Brokaw fever dream in which U.S. industrial production is down because not everybody (read: the dude strumming his 6-string instead of turning those cranks) is working like our fathers used to work.

…Or something like that. All you need to know is those are almost certainly the same greasers in the video as in “Keeping the Faith” and “Uptown Girl.”

So how are we feeling, friends? Exorcised? Or do our microphones all still smell like a beer? Puke. Love it.

MAPPING IT

Head off to work in Allentown.

HEARING IT