“Horrible”: Billy Joel released his biggest hit in 1989 and he’s regretted it ever since (he shouldn’t)
Through every fault of his own, it might not be that cool to like Billy Joel, but we all do. Somewhere deep in the recesses of our biology, he serves up an indulgence that we simply can’t deny.
Studies have actually found that it is a scientific fact: everyone likes Billy Joel. There’s no real evidence, but it’s scientific fact, it’s just that some of us are better at lying to ourselves than others, like fitness freaks claiming burgers are simply not their cup of tea.
So, this all poses the pertinent question of why Joel occupies this strange space in culture betwixt beloved and belittled. He’s even mused on that himself. And it would seem that his 1989 smash hit reveals the answer.
Serving as a paradigm to this puzzle is his biggest single, ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. It is as vilified as it is timeless. Joel, once again, pitches himself between those two poles. But he shouldn’t. It is a masterpiece of the highest order. In the song, he charts his way through history in an abridged manner that condenses knowledge like microchip science.
He weaves his way through manic modern history to arrive at the message that society is simply predisposed to unruly chaos. He pairs this in a postmodern fashion with a maelstrom of synth-driven music to add to the feeling of society’s unstoppable combustion. With a ceaseless tempo, it races into the future, screaming “trouble in the Sueeeeeeeez!” (Only with more eees than our copy editor would allow me).
However, it is the inherent contemporary cheesiness of this music that Joel feels hamstrings the clever thesis of the track. Speaking about the much-maligned masterpiece on We Didn’t Start the Fire: The History Podcast, Joel said of his 1989 single, “The only thing I’ve heard about that song from people is, ‘I hate song!’ Some people hate that song.”
He continued, “It’s one of the most hated things I ever wrote! And I don’t get the hate.” However, even Joel, in his mild defence, admitted that he is ambivalent towards it, musing that it is clever, catchy, and affecting, but he just wishes it was cooler. Many have had similar thoughts in a more generalised sense. Especially when faced with Joel’s sunglasses choice in the video.
“I mean, I hate the music, because it’s not good,” Joel rather harshly opined. “But I think the lyrics are fairly clever, I think I did a pretty good job with the words, but some people just hate that thing.” Yet, much to even Joel’s chagrin, decades down the line, even the haters are still talking about it. In fact, my rundown of every event he mentions in the song is firmly among Far Out’s most circulated articles.
Nevertheless, it does have a certain ‘this song could drive you mad’ quality to it. That’s almost inherent to how it came about. As Joel earnestly explained, “I wrote the words first, which is why the music is so horrible in that song. I usually write the music first and then I write the lyrics, but in that song, the melody…it’s like a mosquito buzzing around your head! It’s more annoying than musical.”
However, you could argue that the mosquito motif is almost fitting for a song about how the unfurling hardships of history can’t be swatted away. In fact, with the barreling words, he happened upon such a clear motif that you could now add a new verse to the track akin to ‘Taylor Swift, terrorists, mortgage rates and federalists, culture wars, lockdown bores, and Donald Trump’s in prison’.
The frantic music adds a sense of vitalised immediacy to the track that is also appropriate for how the song came to be. This particular effort was spawned out of a conversation that Joel had with John Lennon’s son, Sean, in the studio. Sean was with a friend who told Joel that it was a “terrible time” to be a young person. It’s a common conversation through the ages.
Joel was on the eve of his 40th birthday, and he told the despairing youngsters that things weren’t much brighter when he was 21 either. Ultimately, he decided to elucidate this point by depicting the entirety of his 40-year history in an ecstatic textbook of song. It is a song that is perhaps aptly touched with regret. After all, history is full of good ideas gone awry, perfectly honest mistakes, and flashes of genius burdened by commercialism.
Now, almost another 40 years down the line, Joel has cited in countless interviews that his distaste for the track has steadily grown. Perhaps because he knows there’s a golden kernel at its core. Thankfully, that deep regret must surely be abated by the fact it has made him millions over the years, and there are plenty of folks who appraise it as an ingenious work of pop.
