“I love that record”: The song Billy Joel said was so bad it’s good
Not many musicians are writing a song intending to get people to laugh at it. There are people like Weird Al Yankovic who thrive on that kind of music, but if someone is bearing their soul whenever they play, it’s impossible for them to think that someone would ridicule them for putting their feelings out into the world. People didn’t typically have to worry about quality control when Billy Joel was making his classics, but he knew that the new kids on the block did have some stinkers in their catalogue.
But the art of mediocre pop music tends to fluctuate throughout every single generation. No matter how much people might like to see their childhood through rose-coloured glasses, every generation has its fair share of phenomenal records and things considered embarrassing. The 1970s might have Hotel California and Led Zeppelin IV, but it was also the era of ‘Muskrat Love’ as well.
And while Joel’s music was always on the good side of pop, he did have the occasional moment where he slipped. He admitted that Cold Spring Harbor was far from the record he wanted to make, and ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ has a reserved spot on his most hated songs, but his outlook comes more from the craftsmanship of the tune rather than how catchy it is.
Anyone can find time to make something catchy for two minutes, but given that Joel was classically trained, he wanted to make sure that the kids were remembering something with substance rather than something that actively bored them to tears. But when making his way into the 2000s, Joel was probably looking at the charts and wondering where all the great songwriters went.
This was the era when the idea of reality television started to infiltrate people’s homes, but it also made for a manufactured style of writing. Most people were listening to music made by producers like Pharrell and Max Martin, and while they had their place, Joel felt that there was a certain charm in listening to something as synthetic as Britney Spears’s ‘Toxic’ on the radio.
Despite being light years away from his style of music, Joel figured that the song was available for a few cheap laughs when it came on the radio, saying, “[My daughter] loves classical, but sometimes when we’re in the car she’s like, ‘Get that shit off.’ She wants to hear rock &? roll. She’ll point out stuff to me, like Coldplay and Britney Spears. I love that record ‘Toxic’. It’s so bad, it’s good.”
Then again, the song is doing a lot more than being a paint-by-numbers pop song. The chord progression in the synthesisers is a lot more unusual than the typical bubblegum pop tunes that were coming out at the time, and considering the strange sound effects in the middle of it, it almost feels like the beginning of some B-rate James Bond movie rather than what Backstreet Boys may have done a few years before.
It’s not exactly ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or ‘Stairway to Heaven’, but it does deserve a place in musical history for thinking outside the box more than normal. This was an era when music was changing by the minute, and while Joel was willing to play the game a bit, he knew that retiring from his style of music was the right thing to do after River of Dreams.
