The medium Billy Joel thought would kill rock and roll: “I call it”
Nearly all of the most controversial moments in music have centred around technology. One of the more outspoken people in the business, Billy Joel, once claimed one medium in particular to be the death of rock and roll.
The fact that there are constant changes when it comes to tech means that someone always has something to say about it. Most of the time, it’s for a good reason, like how AI is the scourge of the Earth that’s not only destroying the environment but creative minds as well. But while others argue it’s just another iteration of things we’ve had before, the biggest thing people feel threatened by is when it takes over the very things we, as a society, deem sacred.
Whenever you walk around an art gallery, once you’ve got past the strange dissonance of perusing a liminal space, you realise just how true this statement is. Art – all forms – is one of the most important things in culture, period. And the main thing is that it proves that one pesky adage – that a picture is worth a thousand words – to be one of the truest cliches we ever came up with. Some people even say it’s more valuable than religion.
Suppose it makes sense, then, that when we look at the state of AI today, it’s the complete antithesis of art and creativity. It’s a shortcut for everything art stands for without the essence that makes it so great. It’s uncanny, unsettling, and a complete removal of everything that comes across as human. It’s, as Paul McCartney once said, something with absolutely “no sense”.
These sentiments have stretched across decades. Back in the early naughties, people like Billy Corgan were worried about piracy and how it perpetuates churned-out pop music. When MTV came along, people not only saw it as a harmful tool that quashed all efforts to bring diversity back into music and musical programming but as something that destroyed artistic integrity, prioritising style over substance and making an artificial spectacle out of something that’s supposed to be, you guessed it, sacred.
Billy Joel once had some thoughts on the whole MTV surge, saying it epitomised the “short attention span” generation and signalled a negative turn for music. In 1996, he elaborated on this, saying, “I knew a long time ago, actually, in the earlier era of rock and roll, that television was gonna pretty much kill rock and roll. Television is the antithesis of music. Television is eye candy.”
He went on: “Television is prepackaged and sanitised and unintellectualized, you know, it’s like – I call it, what you see on MTV, they call them videos, I call them musical suppositories. They’re pretty much concocted, and they’re jammed up your butt. There you go. Walk around with that for a while.”
His main issue was that television and channels like MTV “commodified” music when it’s something that’s supposed to be enjoyed and appreciated on an individual level, not mass. And this stretched to radio, too – something Joel added was “the tail wagging the dog”. And the only way that art can restore its own value is when artists act like they’re outsiders themselves, even if they’re not. Being authentic and not playing into the mainstream is the only way out, according to Joel.
