Dartblog

Ron Rosenbaum, whose two previous written efforts take as their subjects 1) Shakespeare, and 2) Hitler, is now on to a public figure whose reputation really wants some careful analysis and neatly punctuated approbation: Billy Joel.

My friend Scott Johnson (a Minnesotan) directed me to the piece. He casually agrees with it, and I forgive him. (He is a Minnesotan.)

I once felt just as Ron Rosenbaum does. I thought Billy Joel was just the lowest of the low. Why? Why such scorn for the persistently winning singer/songwriter/pianist—for his clever melodies and thickening harmonics and inventive keyboard work? For a lyric that maintain coherency in passages of odd and abstruse, and straightforward and declarative? I admit it: I cannot remember why. I was a public assailant of Joel’s all through my grade-school years—an evangelist against the Piano Man. A couple of weeks ago I began playing Joel again, rediscovering it on my car iPod. Magnificent stuff. Whence my grief those several years ago? I could not remember.

Ron Rosenbaum, for his part, considers that the locus of his distaste is in Joel’s persistent scorning. The music is bad, he writes, because it works through “a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt’s backside, so to speak.” It’s Holden Caulfield music: disdainful of phonies, which are legion and whose ranks omit only Caulfield (Joel) himself.

That’s bunk. It’s bunk principally because Rosenbaum praises Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan as the anti-B.J.s, which is self-evidently not so, at least as far as the contempt-quotient is concerned.

One rather concludes that Ron Rosenbaum suffers from an odd but well-known condition that debilitates that piece of humanity which permits one to find pleasure in the commandeering power of good melody. Springsteen, Joel, Dylan: there’s plenty of world-weariness in all three. Only one moves the hands to beat and the toes to tap, and Rosenbaum hates it.

Contempt is not the common theme, anyway; and R.R. stretches his argument too thin. He calls “She’s Always a Woman” noxiously anti-women simply because it uses the old adages about inconstancy and casual lies. He calls “Only the Good Die Young” a screen against Catholicism, which it was if all you’d read were the op-ed columns. The song is a story about lust, principally; and its obstacles, incidentally. In “New York State of Mind” Rosenbaum finds contempt in the line “”the movie stars in their fancy cars and their limousines” without considering for even a moment that that line is simply descriptive—descriptive of New York.

Joel’s songs, like all art that can be called good, is evocative; they inspire their listener to furious connection with his own friends, lovers, family; whether Joel is singing a manful ballad (“Always a Woman”) or a sweeping tableau (“Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”) the effect produced in the willing listener is to graph the notional subject onto real people. With the one exception of the sacred, music possesses no stimulative effect without this transaction. Wagner was incapable of doing this. He assays, through sheer force of will—and his will was plenteous—to beat this law, and he fails in the way a nine-ton chunk of earth and cliff fails to fly. The life of Mozart’s mind was lived—very lived—according to this rule. Puccini hadn’t genius enough to explore the fringes of the rule; and knowing that, he practiced nothing more than dead-ahead disquisition: he gave his audience the human relations straightly. A Puccini opera about love writ large? He had talent enough to know not to try.

In preparing this little aegis I needed to look up some Joel lyrics. I found myself at online lyric repositories, which have all been upgraded to social networking sites. The first user comment under the first song I retrieved (“The Longest Time”) was from Robyn.

Robyn says:

I love this song. My favourite part is: “I don’t care what consequence it brings/ I have been a fool for lesser things/ I want you so bad/ I think you ought to know that/ I intend to hold you for the longest time.”

Because before I decided to actually start dating my boyfriend I was thinking about it for ages, I listened to this song and it inspired me to do it. I have been a fool for lesser things and he was worth every effort.

It is surprising that Rosenbaum is unmoved by Joel’s music—he and I must share some rags of sentiment, since we both grew up in metro NY/NJ—but we might attribute it merely to taste. (Bad taste, to put the point finely: sorry, Ron.) The exponents of quality, d’apres Rosenbaum, appear to be Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. (Indeed the golden Garden State upbringing so mawkishly misrepresented by Joel has, Rosenbaum, been redeemed by The Boss. “New Jersey may have a rep as a toxic dump for mob victims to fester in,” he writes, “but at least it brought forth Bruce Springsteen.” If there is any singer New Jersey “brought forth” then that artist is Frank Sinatra, baby. N.J. “brought forth” Springsteen? O, this Joel question is indeed a matter of taste.

Joel is slighted as saccharine, but no attempt to made to explore how his themes might be better handled. “Always a Woman” too silly? How, exactly, is “Tunnel of Love” better?

Could we imagine Robyn writing:

I love this song. My favourite part is: “I can feel the soft silk of your blouse/ And them soft thrills in our little fun house/ Then the lights go out and its just the three of us/ You me and all that stuff were so scared of/ Gonna ride down baby into this tunnel of love.”

Because before I decided to actually start dating my boyfriend I was thinking about it for ages, I listened to this song, and remembered how he felt the soft silk of my blouse, and it inspired me to do it. I was scared of all that stuff but then he successfully plundered my love-tunnel, and now we are devotedly in love.

“Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” “annoying and clichéd”? O.K., Rosalita.

Rob Rosenbaum’s is a Slate article, so one cross to which his target is nailed is misogyny. “She’s Always a Woman” is dismissed thusly: “B.J.’s woman also: is prone to ‘casual lies,’ ‘steals like a thief,’ ‘takes care of herself,’ and ‘carelessly cuts you and laughs …’ Poor B.J., recycling every misogynist cliché in the book.”

The passage nearly suggests that our friend Ron is not a consumer of art at all. Allowing for the moment that he is not into gender-bending po-po-mo indulgences, with inanities of every description chipping away at civilization’s hard-won strictures about who’s who and what’s what, and that he consumes regular stuff, then why does he find it a penetrating argument that Joel’s women are fickle and inconstant? Did we not just recall that Ron wrote the book on Shakespeare?

If Rosenbaum hangs this gossamer on anything, it’s on the offenses of “It’s Still Rock ‘n Roll to Me.” Here I shall prove abstemious, because I do not really like rock ‘n roll, and find Billy Joel’s general achievement to have been the hemming in and back of that form, using classical, jazz, and blues idioms.

Ron Rosenbaum:

What else? What if you had to choose one song as the epitome of B.J. badness?

OK, I think it would have to be “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.”

Why?

It shows how completely, totally clueless Billy Joel is. It suggests he wrote it because he thought people regarded him as an outmoded relic because he doesn’t wear the right hip-signifier clothes. That it’s a matter of his wide ties vs. New Wave skinny ties, that it’s because his car doesn’t have white-wall tires or because he doesn’t dress “like a Beau Brummell” or hang out with the right crowd or look like Elvis Costello.

He thinks people can’t stand him because he dresses wrong or doesn’t look right.

Well. Here we have an old-fashioned lack of analytical pressure. “Still Rock and Roll” has two voices: the wheedled and the wheedler. Rosenbaum believes that the wheedled is Joel himself. It’s backwards. The beseiged-as-unhip is the driver of the car. “Can’t you tell that it’s out of style,” he begs the hommes de couture, his assailants. He is a poseur, straining to keep up-to-date with the revolving reflexive reintroductions of vintage. Joel wonders whether all that exercise is wise: perhaps he should discover his own sensibilities and defend them vigorously. It is a pro-art, conservative argument. It makes sense. In just the way, I suppose, that Bob Dylan does not make sense.

There is also this: Billy Joel’s material has lasted mostly because it infected and reflects accurately the adolescence at a certain period of time in the most culturally influential region in the U.S.: New York and New Jersey. It is at turns mere sentiment, but popular music as a matter of necessity uses sentiment as an heuristic for actual feeling. We cannot feel constantly; we would be frozen; it is right to compose a catalog of indicia, leaving tender moments alone. That is how art accompanies and enriches life, rather than consuming it.

Billy Joel is going to have the last word: his music is infectious and persistent. We must presently concern ourselves with the certain injustices performed upon a man not in a position to defend himself. As mentioned at the outset, Rosenbaum has composed something on Shakespeare. I haven’t a clue what it is, but if this little tirade contra Joel is an indication, then Shakespeare—that sentimentalist! that misogynist! that overfeeling, throbbing muscle of dissatisfaction with the-world-as-it-is—is in for some razor swipes sure to provide ready reason for the nation’s English teachers to nudge him further into the recesses of the bookshelf. Those self-same teachers sing about their sweet romantic teenage nights on the drive home.

ZAK Adds: a most enthusiastic second to Joe’s able defense of Billy Joel. I do hope, however, that I was wrong in detecting a slight directed at Bruce Springsteen’s Rosalita, annoying and cliche I think not!