The song Billy Joel thought his audience was wrong to hate: “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Billy Joel has connected with millions of people through his slice-of-life, Americana lyrics. Through songs like ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’, which chronicles the relationship of high school sweethearts Brenda and Eddie until their divorce, or the famous ‘Piano Man’ which explores the lives of the people, strangers and friends who are passing their time in a piano lounge, he paints a colourful yet real picture of the world around.
Joel has always had the capacity to convey the American experience and the truth of the ‘American Dream’ through songs that explore the lives of regular people, and ‘Allentown’, released in 1982 as a single from his album The Nylon Curtain, is an exemplary example.
‘Allentown’ focuses on a town by the same name, but serves as an allegory of the experience of young blue-collar Americans living in the emerging ‘Rust Belt’. In towns with dying industries, many were sold a tale of the ‘American Dream’, but they were coming to terms with the real America they were living in, and the disillusionment of that dreamworld not looking like the world of their parents, the Baby Boomer generation. Joel soulfully sings, “Every child had a pretty good shot / to get at least as far as their old man got / But something happened on the way to that place / They threw an American flag in our face”.
Though his music can on occasion lean political, like the lyrics from ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, Joel views himself more as a storyteller. “How can you not write about it? This is what I see. This is what’s going on in this country. I’m not trying to be Bob Dylan, necessarily, but I’m a songwriter, and you write about what you see going on,” he admitted.
The song invoked mixed responses, some viewing the song as dramatising blue-collar life with down-trodden stereotypes, especially as he was by then a musician who had garnered quite a bit of success and was able to live comfortably. In The Complete Albums Collection, when addressing people’s feelings towards ‘Allentown’, Joel said, “There was a certain attitude of ‘Who the hell is he to talk about being unemployed? He’s a rich rock star’. I thought it was so ironic. I said, ‘Wait a minute, you’re saying this because I’m a musician, [that] I don’t know what it’s like to be unemployed? Are you fucking kidding me? We invented the word’. I’ve been more unemployed than most people I know.”
However, the song struck a chord with the people of Allentown, who felt it represented their experience and led to their garnering 10,000 signatures to have Billy Joel perform the song, in the town that it was named after.
And ever being the people’s man, he did so on December 27th, 1982. Joel played a sold-out show at Stabler Arena in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a close neighbour of Allentown, and also a town referenced in the track. It was once home to Bethlehem Steel, the company that was responsible for the area’s steel industry expansion.
Joel opened and closed the concert with ‘Allentown‘, receiving a five-minute standing ovation. He was later awarded with a key to the city in Pennsylvania by Mayor Joseph Daddona, who saw the track as a “gritty song about a gritty city”.
