The song Billy Joel wrote to insult his critics
Not that I’m biased or anything, but the bile that musicians seem to have for music critics really does grind my gears. To have haters in the press is the very definition of a champagne problem. As the continued existence of Nickelback shows, even when we’re slating you, we’re still promoting you, and it still works. So, whenever you see some megastar chuck their toys out of their pram because the press isn’t fellating them quite as hard as they should, I can’t help but also hear the plaintive song of the world’s smallest violin. Even if it’s playing for an icon like Billy Joel.
This is a blanket statement, too. One that’s as applicable to Lizzo ranting on Twitter that music writers should be unemployed because Pitchfork reviewed her album as it is to the Piano Man himself putting his ire into song. By 1980, Joel was a veteran of pop music. A decade and a half into his career, he’d seen trends rise and fall, outlasting all of them. As is always the case with being a lifer in music, he’d also seen his stock rise and fall, too.
At the moment, his commercial clout was at an all-time high. 1977’s The Stranger broke him into the mainstream, becoming his label Columbia’s biggest-selling release and hurtling classics like ‘Just The Way You Are’ into the Billboard Hot 100. The year after, 52nd Street had continued this commercial hot streak, but only a few short years later, he’d fallen squarely out of fashion. To the point where the question had to be asked whether he’d ever been in fashion, to begin with.
Granted, it’s never nice to have your life’s work be mocked and discredited. I should know, I’m a music writer. If Lizzo and Joel think that they have it so bad, they should try having all that without the millions of fans and pots of money that come from it. So Joel decided to turn the way he was feeling about that into a song, and, credit to him, he at least found a more interesting way of doing that than most.
Rather than just squirt out a tired “fuck the haters” anthem that all jaded pop stars turn to when out of ideas, Joel looked to the artists that were getting popular. At the dawn of the 1980s, these were New Wave acts like Blondie, The Police and The Cars. Joel felt like they were just doing the same kind of stripped-down rock ‘n’ roll and power pop he was inspired by, so why were they so cool and he wasn’t? After all… ‘It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me’, so he thought.
The song ended up being a colossal hit and a big change in Joel’s sound. Shedding his sensitive balladeer image for the leather-jacketed rocker seen chucking a rock through a window on the cover of his new album, Glass Houses. ‘…Rock and Roll To Me’ reached the top of the Billboard charts, and one can only hope that, along with the astonishing success that he’d go on to have throughout the 1980s, helped soothe the pain of a couple of writers finding his music a little uninspired.
Truly, nobody in this world has it harder than the fabulously rich and famous.
