Why is Billy Joel suddenly so beloved by the TikTok generation?
Among the top artists dominating TikTok right now, there’s Taylor Swift, Pink Panthress, Benson Boone… and Billy Joel?
It is quite an odd phenomenon, with Joel, in all his 76 years, maintaining a legacy at the tip of the cultural zeitgeist just as much, and if not more, than artists more than four decades his junior. Take a scroll through your For You page and you’ll inevitably find a quarter-life crisis played out to ‘Vienna’, but also graduation posts soundtracked to ‘She’s Always a Woman’, and dramatic memes to ‘Piano Man’. It’s quite mad, really.
Of course, much of this can be explained by the TikTok penchant for reviving old music for the younger masses to rediscover, with no one often as shocked as the artists themselves when they catch wind that their long-forgotten hit from 1974 is suddenly beloved again by 16-year-olds. But there seems to be a particular constant focus on Joel, as the algorithm steadily picks its way through his songbook one by one to find the next viral sound.
It’s as if Joel’s lyrics have suddenly found their peak of resonance amid the cultural landscape of the mid-2020s, where naïve girls flit between lovestruck yearning and personal searching, and find their epiphanies in a song a middle-aged man wrote in 1977. It’s phrases like “Slow down, you crazy child/ You’re so ambitious for a juvenile,” that seem to send the TikTok worshippers into a tailspin. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I need!’, they think, as if no one else in the decades before them has ever thought the same way before.
Naturally, this is all just part of teenage or adolescent coming of age, which we can all look back and cringe upon in later years – and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a canon event of growing up. But whether it’s ‘Vienna’ or ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, Joel is a constant presence on the current social media zeitgeist in soundtracking these moments, and not necessarily in a sell-out way.
Aside from the odd promotional video or re-released classic cut, the ‘Piano Man’ has largely allowed his relatively newfound social media success to step in time with the current beats of his life, which are, in fact, decidedly slowing down. He recently cancelled his entire stadium tour due to health issues, and while this would have been an invariable disappointment in terms of capitalising on his popularity, it’s also not done him any harm.
Indeed, it’s probably quite refreshing to see an ageing star not being forced to reignite his entire brand as if he’s some fresh-faced 20-year-old, just because some kids on TikTok like his music. There’s a respectful acknowledgement of the fact that this is a man in his twilight years, and that sometimes it’s nice to leave the classic hits as they are, rather than trying in vain to reinvent the wheel.
Maybe that’s why Joel proves to be the current generation’s legendary musical god. He’s got catchy songs, he’s got lyrical heart, but above all else, he’s not trying to shove himself down our throats. New fans can come to enjoy his songbook without it being tarnished by some half-arsed new addition or poorly received rework, and just let it revel in all its classic glory. Maybe Joel decided to listen to his own words, when he once said we all should “take the phone off the hook, and disappear for a while.”
