Billy Joel, Backstreet Guy

I'm hardly the first to point this out, and I'm at least twenty years too late, but Billy Joel clearly has no sense of who he is, what his music sounds like, or how perceive him.

Take, for example, "Uptown Girl." Great song. I love it. Polished, with a slight doo wop feel to it. Cute video, too, with his future bride Christie Brinkley playing the uptown girl to his downtown man. Here's how Joel portrays himself in the song: "backstreet guy," "downtown man," and too poor "to buy her pearls."

We get a similar picture at the tail end of "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" when Joel sees himself as a latter day Billy the Kid.

From a town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island
Rode a boy with a six-pack in his hand
And his daring life of crime
Made him a legend in his time
East and west of the Rio Grande

We get it, Billy. You're rough. You're gritty. You work hard. You're an alternative to the mainstream.

Except not.

Go back to "Uptown Girl." Listen to it. No "backstreet guy" would ever be caught dead listening to a song like that, to say nothing of singing it. Going falsetto? Come on. And that's to say nothing of "Longest Time." Gorgeous harmonies, slickly produced. Pop at its best. If anything, Billy Joel's music is too smooth. If I had to describe Joel's sound in a word, it'd be "facile."

Then consider his audience. Billy Joel's music is about as mainstream as it gets. Show me 100 people who bought any albums from, say, 1973 to 1983 and I'll show you 95 people who bought Billy Joel albums.

People dance to Billy Joel at weddings. If that's not a signifier of being the mainstream, I don't know what is.

How about his lifestyle? While Joel may have had it rough growing up (as rough as it gets in suburban Long Island, I suppose), by 1983 (when "Uptown Girl" came out) he was hardly scrounging around for rent money. Hell, he married Christie Brinkley. When you sell as many albums as Billy Joel did, you're living pretty comfortably.

Now, Billy Joel is hardly the first or last to have a musical self-image that differs so dramatically from reality (Sean Combs, anyone?). But it's hard to find anything about him that's similar to the Billy Joel described in Billy Joel songs. Much of his music falls squarely on the pop side of the pop/rock divide. His commercial success both signified widespread appreciation for his work and guaranteed a privileged lifestyle.

That's fine. But these aspects of Billy Joel's music and life just don't jibe with the gritty, working-class guy-on-the-corner he wanted us all to think he was.