Joel’s famous song “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”? Please. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. This must be prevented! No career re-evaluations please! No false contrarian rehabilitations! He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. He still takes up the space, takes up A&R advances that would otherwise support a score of unrecognized but genuinely talented artists, singers, and songwriters, with his loathsomely insipid simulacrum of rock. Still, the mystery persists: How can he be so bad and yet so popular for so long? He’s still there. He’s been subject to withering contempt from hipster types for so long that it no longer seems worth the time. It is a kind of mystery: Why does his music make my skin crawl in a way that other bad music doesn’t? Why is it that so many of us feel it is possible to say Billy Joel is-well-just bad, a blight upon pop music, a plague upon the airwaves more contagious than West Nile virus, a dire threat to the peacefulness of any given elevator ride, not rock ’n’ roll but schlock ‘n’ roll? Which brings me to Billy Joel-the Andrew Wyeth of contemporary pop music-and the continuing irritation I feel whenever I hear his tunes, whether in the original or in the multitude of elevator-Muzak versions.
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