“It started to bother me”: How Billy Joel’s hatred of ‘The Midnight Special’ shaped his art
While many performers often have to make compromises when it comes to finding ways to fit into the mould that the mainstream lays out for them, every once in a while, an artist like Billy Joel arrives and refuses to be treated like the rest of the crowd.
A common issue with the mere existence of a mainstream market for pop music is the constant way in which artists are placed into certain genre classifications and advertised to people with certain interests as though there’s no room for diversification. Make it known to the world that you’re a fan of a certain artist, and you’ll only end up being fed or tempted by similar artists, something that has become increasingly prevalent in the modern algorithm-driven world.
This has, however, always been the case, and therefore those who want to explore a wider variety of different styles are going to become frustrated after a while when they realise that they’re being pushed towards a series of acts that are being described in the same way, or even going as far as to present themselves in exactly the same manner.
This isn’t exactly helpful for anyone in the long run, but it’s a trap that many fall into, and it leads to there being an increased view of music becoming homogenous. Many artists are constantly emerging with their own individual identities and quirks that make them stand out, but it’s hard to make these traits stand out when all people are ever looking for is the next iteration of what they’re comfortable with.
The early works of Joel were well-received by critics, but had little in the way of commercial success, and this was largely down to how he refused to be pigeonholed by the music industry as any one thing. Yes, he was a piano player who wrote his own songs, but that doesn’t mean he was actually trying to be like all of the other singer-songwriters who were gaining popularity at the same time.
In the days before the advent of streaming, specialist radio shows and television programmes were the primary way in which people would be driven towards a certain style of music. What Joel hated most about this was the way in which this stripped artists of whatever agency they had, rendering them unable to express themselves freely in the way that they wanted to, and having to adhere to preset industry guidelines.
Frustrated by the way in which this worked against the artist, Joel decided to indirectly call out the long-running music television show The Midnight Special for the way they treated the performers as disposable vessels for our entertainment in his biting song, ‘The Entertainer’, taken from his 1974 album, Streetlife Serenade.
“I found it kind of infantile the way they would present acts,” Joel later commented during an interview with broadcaster Howard Stern. “It wasn’t very rock and roll. Midnight Special was kind of an assembly line, and it started to bother me. Like we’re all interchangeable.”
You can sense his frustration with the way that artists were being treated by shows like this, and while the show itself was certainly a popular fixture for many years, the format had become tired and reached its limit. Midnight Special inadvertently illustrated how the industry was desperately begging for something to change and for artists to begin demonstrating themselves as individuals rather than products, and Joel was smart enough to notice that at a time when something could have been done about it.
