Embracing the Lameness of Billy Joel

What Craig Finn and Daniel Johnston taught me about my most embarrassing musical obsession.

Billy Joel is releasing yet another box set soon, The Vinyl Collection, Vol. 2, which focuses on his output from the ‘80s and ‘90s. It runs the gamut from that song about homoerotic steelworkers through his Boomer anthem that’s basically Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” for people who don’t think Jann Wenner is racist.

I won’t be buying it. Not because it’s $200 for music I can hear for free by saying, “Alexa, play Billy Joel.” But because it’s from that sweet spot in the Joel canon where I was at the peak of my Joel fandom. And I still have some prickly memories from that time.

“Hey, have you seen the new Billy Joel video?” I asked Debbie, the prettiest girl in school.

The year was 1985. I was 16 and about as low on the teenage social hierarchy as you could get without hitting rock bottom. Debbie, in addition to being laughably out of my league, was surrounded by muscular dudes in football jerseys, with imposing jawlines and veiny forearms. It was the equivalent of swimming in shark-infested waters with a vest made of chum. The sharks were gonna laugh at me, and then eat me alive.

She stared at me, blank-faced. “I’m sorry?”

“‘You’re Only Human, parentheses Second Wind’?” I said, spelling out the parenthetical for some reason.

Still, nothing.

“From his Greatest Hits? Have you picked it up yet? I only bought it for the two new songs, which...” I forced a laugh... “is kind of hardcore, I know.”

The beefy boys around her sneered, but Debbie, bless her heart, just smiled tenderly, in the way you do when you’re saying no to a homeless man asking for change. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said. “I’m not much of a Billy Joel fan.”

My chest exploded. I felt embarrassed but mostly betrayed. Just a few months earlier, I’d spent an awkward weekend at Debbie’s house. Our respective families were friendly, and when my grandmother needed gallbladder surgery in New York, I bunked with them while my parents flew out for the procedure. As a socially inept teen boy with no experience with the opposite sex, I treated it as a fact-finding mission. Their unfairly hot daughter, whose direct gaze I avoided like a solar eclipse, had a record collection, and I studied it like it held all the secrets of what women really want.

Debbie owned a copy of Billy Joel’s The Stranger, which smelled like Calvin Klein’s Obsession for some reason. Even before the first note, I was hooked.

Just like pot leads to heroin, obsessing over The Stranger because you discovered it in a hot girl’s bedroom leads to becoming intimately familiar with the entire Billy Joel canon.

By the time I mustered the courage to talk to Debbie, I thought I was ready. I’d done my homework. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be rejected with such extreme prejudice. How had I misread the signals so badly? She had a Billy Joel record in her bedroom. How all-of-a-fucking-sudden was she “not much of a Billy Joel fan”?

I jumped to the only logical conclusion that any insecure teenager would: I am an idiot who doesn’t understand women or music, and I am going to die alone listening to “You’re Only Human, parentheses Second Wind.”

That should’ve been the end of it. But it wasn’t. My Billy Joel obsession grew. I collected every recording, including both Cold Spring Harbor, his poor man’s James Taylor debut, and Attila, his pre-fame metal band, with a cover featuring Joel and his band-mate dressed like Huns and posing in a meat locker.

I would air-piano to “Angry Young Man” in front of a mirror in my teenage bedroom. I went to several Joel concerts, two during the Innocent Man tour, and in every case I was disappointed that he didn’t play more “deep cuts.” 

Even now, almost thirty years later, the memory still makes me recoil. I feel like I double-downed on the wrong guy. A few weekends wasted listening to Glass Houses isn’t going to kill anybody. But teenagers who say things like “I can sing the lyrics to ‘Zanzibar’ from memory” don’t also say things like “I’m exhausted from getting all these handjobs!”

Renouncing the music of your past is hardly unique. The world is filled with people who still feel weird that they once spent an entire summer waiting in front of the TV for Duran Duran’s “Rio” video to come on, or couldn’t be waterboarded into admitting that they once owned a copy of Phil Collins’ “Sussudio” on cassingle. 

It’s not enough to expunge every trace of your pop-music misdeeds from your permanent collection. You have to treat it like a sickness, a cancer that you finally beat after years of chemotherapy and Eastern medicine.

While the musical sins of your past are demonized out of proportion, the choices that age better get wildly exaggerated. As a teen, I somehow ended up in possession of a tattered copy of the Replacements’ bootleg “The Shit Hits the Fans.” To hear me talk about it now, it was my musical bible, a lifeline to sanity in a suburban Scheol. But I probably only listened to it once or twice before returning to something less aurally abrasive, like that song where Billy Joel reminds a Catholic schoolgirl of the mortality statistics among the devoutly religious.

For at least the last thirty or so years, Billy Joel has been safely in my rearview mirror. I’d hum a few lyrics if one of his songs came on the car radio, but with lukewarm enthusiasm, like I sing along with the “Star-Spangled Banner” at a baseball game. But in middle age, I feel less contrite about my Joel fandom and more… Bi-curious. (That’s Billy Joel curious, not the other thing.)

The switch happened several years ago when I interviewed Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn. I brought up his alleged Billy Joel fandom, which I’d read about in some deep, dark part of the webiverse.

“I’m a guarded Billy Joel fan,” he admitted. “I read something once, I think it was by that guy from Phish, and he was talking about how sometimes you play a guitar riff that’s super-lame, but then you just keep playing it, and he called it embracing the lameness. That’s pretty much what I think about Billy Joel. You gotta embrace the lameness and see if it can come out the other side to the cool place. You gotta walk into the cave of lameness to see if there’s a back exit.”

At the time, I thought it was a hilarious bit of deflection. A confession couched in air quotes. Like a serial killer on the stand admitting, “Yeah, I killed those people. But I did it ironically.” But I’m not so sure anymore that’s what Finn meant.

As we age, there are two stages to music appreciation: When we’re young, we want to listen to what’s cool. And when we’re old, we listen to whatever we want because we don’t care what other people think is cool. But there’s a third level, one that I’ve only recently discovered. When you realize that what you thought was lame is actually pretty cool while simultaneously being lame.

It’s not about having an epiphany that other people are wrong. They’re not wrong. Every single criticism of Billy Joel’s discography is absolutely, one hundred percent correct. And it’s not about freeing yourself from peer pressure. Billy Joel fans who say, “I don’t care what other people think” are the music equivalent of white people who insist, “I don’t see color!”

Billy Joel started to make more sense to me when I listened to him with the same patience that I listened to the late Daniel Johnston. The two artists aren’t all that different: they’re both self-loathing misfits who wrote simple, bubblegummy love songs about (autobiographical) doomed relationships. The only real difference between “True Love Will Find You in the End” and “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” is that Johnston at least knew sadness was inevitable.

Joel had the advantage because he had a better voice and access to a professional recording studio. But neither was a poet—they’re imperfect artists who had big ambitions to make perfect, Beatles-esque songs, and they did the best they could with the gifts they were given. Joel ended up with more mainstream fame and money, and Daniel got more credibility from the cool kids, but neither was taken all that seriously.

“In the big picture of pop music, I don't know if what I've created is seen as being that important or that necessary,” Joel told the New York Times in a 2002 interview, in which he was feeling particularly morose about his legacy.

“I’m like most other human beings,” he added. “I try and I fail.”

There’s something beautiful about how Joel tries and fails. If you look at his songs that way, as the creations of a parallel universe Daniel Johnston with a major label deal and just enough melancholy to be convincing, it’s impossible not to root for him. Even when his songs come up short, and sometimes especially when they do, they’re heartbreaking. Billy Joel never made art, and neither did Daniel Johnston, but it’s weirdly cathartic to watch them try.

Or to put it another way, their songs are the musical embodiments of an uncool teenager trying to impress an unfairly hot girl with “You're Only Human, parentheses Second Wind.” You gotta embrace the lameness because sometimes that’s all you have.

As I write this, “Angry Young Man” is blaring through my headphones, and I’m not resisting it. I’d forgotten how badass the droning C note opening is in “Angry Young Man.” The lyrics don’t get much more complex than “I’m young and angry,” which is the least original observation in pop music since “I’m young and horny.” But goddamn do those pounding thumbs sound great.

There’s a reasonably good chance that, by the time you finish reading this paragraph, I’ll be air-pianoing to “Angry Young Man” with the same manic and unironic glee I did as a teenager. And for the first time in a long while, I’m okay with that. I’m going to embrace that delicious lameness with everything I’ve got, and like Craig Finn said, see if there’s something cool on the other side.

And now, for my paid subscribers, to either prove my point or decisively disprove it, here’s my brother, a hedge fund investor and best-selling author that Fortune recently called “one of the brightest minds on Wall Street,” teaching my son to play “Angry Young Man” on piano during a Thanksgiving visit.