The singer Billy Joel called the first original frontman: “Great body, long hair, pouty lips”
The older generation absolutely loves Billy Joel. And apparently, so does TikTok.
It’s a pretty interesting phenomenon, especially when you encounter any of his hits – including ‘Piano Man’ and ‘Vienna’ – the moment you pick up your phone for a five-minute doom-scroll. Joel is seemingly everywhere, the audio of choice for most Gen Z content creators trying to tap into the sentimentality or nostalgia in all of us, even if we weren’t physically around when the songs first came out.
When you really think about it, though, it makes complete sense because Joel is, to many diehard fans, a straight hit of nostalgia, and his music is often catchy, emotional, and personally resonant, and songs like ‘Piano Man’, no matter how overplayed, possess that secret ingredient that immediately catches your attention.
If you’ve ever been sat next to someone scrolling through platforms like TikTok, you’ll know what it feels like to hear a snippet of the song and wish you were listening to the whole thing because it transports you somewhere else, somewhere specific, even if you’re not aware of the story behind the song. Perhaps even especially then.
All of this is due to the simple fact that Joel has always been an avid student of music, a genuine music lover who has always been committed to learning and improving, and he seems to know everything, too, from the structures and theories behind classical music to the formulaic rules of pop music, having given intellectual talks, delivered knowledgeable tidbits in interviews, and crafted some of the greatest, generation-defining hits in history.
In short, he’s more than earned his title as a legend. But it’s only because he knows exactly what a legend looks like and allows his mind to grow from those seeds of wisdom. He might not be your typical frontman, but he knows what one looks like and knows how he stands apart in his own unique ways. For instance, he once described Mick Jagger as the “original frontman”, a blueprint from which others tried to follow suit.
“Mick Jagger was the original frontman. Great body, long, great hair, pouty lips,” Joel said during a Q&A at Harvard University in 1994, before delving into the charm of John Dizek, the frontman of his 1960s band, The Hassles. A lot of what he addressed was the inexplicable charm set by people like Jagger, and how often, that’s all it took to get people engaged.
Of course, it would be hard to find anybody who disagreed with Joel’s claim about Jagger being at least one of the most defining frontmen in rock, especially when you look at all of the reasons why The Rolling Stones carved out their own space during a time that was largely being reigned by The Beatles. But that’s precisely what they did – they were more far-out and rebellious, mainly thanks to Jagger’s unapologetic streak of charisma.
Joel, on the other hand, knows he was never like that, and yet he managed to capture the spirit of an entire generation anyway. He’s a legend among the older generation and a consistent presence among the kids on social media, proving that you don’t always have to look the part to be important; you just have to have something worthwhile to say that people will keep coming back to.
