The All-But Inevitable Billy Joel Post

Billy Joel, "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant"
Guillemots, "Annie, Let's Not Wait"

Talk all the shit about Billy Joel that you want to - go on, I'll even give you a minute to terraform your contempt to your liking - but the simple fact of the matter is that you're about as likely to talk my copy of The Stranger or 52nd Street or An Innocent Man out of my CD collection as you are to talk a baby out of its mother's loving embrace. Being that I was, y'know, alive during that inexorable stretch of time when "River of Dreams" was getting "SexyBack"-level airplay, it's not like I'm oblivious to the fact that Mr. Bill is one of, if not outright the, most mortifying musicians making himself available for Your Vaunted Consumption in the world today; you have my unchecked assurance that the small volume of throwup that found its way into my mouth after watching Joel explain his "dead-air protest" on VH1 that time easily surpassed that in yours. Moreover, as someone (and this may come as a HUGE SHOCK) who's read Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs in excess of forty bajillion times, I'm also hardly oblivious to the other way to read Joel's songwriting failures, namely as the subconscious triumph of humanity over artistry and yada yada yada - not that I necessarily disagree with that reading, mind you, but almost by definition it's just as reductive as "B1lly j03l iZ tEh sUXxXorZ".

No, I like Billy Joel to a legitimately comical extent because I find myself unavoidably drawn to the moments when he gets stuff really, really right, or more specifically the way those moments contrast against the overwhelming bounty of stuff he gets painfully, viscerally wrong. It is, I think, one thing to write a song noteworthy for the minute scope of the details it presents you with or the psychic drama it seeks to address; as a nearly-eight-minute four-movement suite, it's clear that this is the type of songwriting "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" wants desperately to be and fails miserably at being, since the world needs artifacts to reassure boomer yuppie scum that their presence on the planet is worthy of preservation almost as much as I need a railroad spike pounded right through the middle of my dick. I mean, in terms of its theme and subject matter and scope, about the nicest thing you can say about it is "Well, I suppose it's quicker to get through than The Big Chill", except that you still come out the poorer for denying yourself one more chance to hear Marvin Gaye sing "I Heard It Through The Grapevine".

But in terms of execution, I'd take "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" over damn near any work of Yuppie art right up to the threshold of Bonfire of the Vanities. That's not to say that he's some paragon of virtue for getting it right, mind you - just that there's moments in all his best songs, "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" first among them, where it becomes nigh-impossible to ignore either his methodology or the charge with which he enters into it, and anyone thinking that that's no reason to like a song needs to go ahead and delete "Since U Been Gone" off yr hard drive lest ye be revealed as a weak-kneed dogmatic dilettante. I mean, "Scenes" is a song about memory, right? And the way reality plays out differently from how memory would lead you to believe it would have (*kills self*), right? So it's virtuous and artistic of Joel to come up with a structure that gives him the freedom to drift back and forth between planes of remembered time, namely the pop-suite structure and the gradual ramping-up of the tempo peaking with memories of high school just tumbling out? Well, uh, no; that just makes him better at writing songs than Michael McDonald. But the point isn't the gimmick - or at least the point shouldn't be the gimmick if you aren't my mom - so much as the way Joel steps into it; motherfucker just attacks that "Brenda and Eddie" middle bit with the same kind of knowing passion your parents took to you when they caught you smoking weed that time, but he critically never takes over the song entirely, giving all manner of instruments their fair chance to put the hurtin' on you. And I've found that it's that coexistance between Joel's performance and his song that ultimately makes both; the fact that it's not - or at least not just - The Billy Joel Show makes it feel incalculably less like chicken soup for the Yuppie soul than, at the risk of overquoting Dr. Mathers, "beautiful music I made for you to just cherish". In other words, the fact that there's no applicable meaning in "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" for you doesn't mean that there's not boatloads of meaning Joel can apply to himself, nor (TORTUOUS CLAUSE ALERT) does it mean that his self-application doesn't have anything meaningful to do with you. After all, if you take it as such, it stops being one out of a billion songs about Olde Lurve Going Badde and becomes simply a song about the process of memor, an infinitely more interesting premise for a song even without taking into consideration that it was meant to be consumed by your parents when they should have been making sure you weren't out playing in traffic. It's a remarkable achievement of songcraft, the level of which more than makes up for the bounty of embarassment it has to offer ("Bottle of redOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOObottlawhyte", LORD, TAKE ME NOW, I BEEN GOOD), and the existance of which makes me die a little inside every time I hear people comparing Joel to the most punchable man in the history of the world.

Especially, and this is crucial if you want to understand my musical psyche, when Fyfe Dangerfield somehow managed to pull off the same trick something like eight times in eleven songs. Needless to say, I've been listening to the Guillemots' debut album Through the Windowpane with shamefully predictable regularity ever since it showed up in my mailbox; I have to say that I expected it to be good, but after the typhoon of near-orgasmic delight each of the singles personified so ably, I was only really expecting it to be good enough to let me say "I expected it to be good" as a way to register my disappointment. Well, uh, nope; if Through the Windowpane hadn't happened to come out in the same year as a masterpiece of studied mastercraftsmanship like Silent Shout, it'd be my hands-down album of the year just on the strength of all the songs where Dangerfield - to be fair, really all four of them in the band, although Dangerfield does make for a dangerously tempting simulacrum - just utterly steps into the spirit of the song like he's returning to the womb.

And yet the quote I can't get out of my head is the otherwise-unimpeachable Cindy Hotpoint offhandedly remarking that the Guillemots write bad songs - I shit you not, that quote's been buzzing around my dome like a fly I can't shoo out of my apartment since the day I read it, mostly because I have to admit that it's kinda true. I mean, you don't even want to know how many times I've played "Annie, Let's Not Wait" since I slid Through The Windowpane into my CD drive, and yet even so, it's still packing line after linethat make me die a thousand cowards' deaths every time they pop up (tip for aspiring songwriters: the best way to kill off the momentum your song gains from That Bit Where It Finally Kicks Into High Gear is to have that bit punctuate a line as bad as "And woke up in a field of corn", especially if you mean it as a reference to that goddamned Walt Whitman poem). But just because most of the song's lyrical content may deserve to be dragged kicking and screaming behind the barn for a bullet in the ear doesn't mean that it isn't crafted with magnificent aplomb towards affording Dangerfield all the space he needs to stride through the song's bouncy dynamic; the man just sails into the song's big dramatic moments - the chorus kicking in, the tetchy, Eddie-Argos-esque restraint he shows before the first verse breaks into full-on Yacht Rock mode, good lord almighty the delivery of the "I found somethin' dyin'/It was my light" couplet - with all the confidence of someone who's never been told that he isn't actually the second coming of Freddie Mercury. And then, during those fleeting moments when the song and he cross swords of inspiration, never more so than with Dangerfield's closing line ("Oh, I love you and that's all you need to know"), God might as well peel the roof the sky back like the lid on a can of sardines and pull me right on up. I mean, fuck, yes, I'll admit it: this is a song that knowingly contains a couplet that rhymes "cute" with "suit", but so fuckin' what? There comes a point when you realize that at a certain level, song lyrics exist for the benefit of people too uncreative to describe their own lives, and once you reach that point you immediately stop giving all that much of a shit about what - if not "whether" - lyrics mean to you, especially when they're set against - no, wait, scratch that; set in accompaniment to - a musical background as rich and idealized as that of "Annie, Let's Not Wait" or "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant". At the very least, it's the kind of realization that should keep you from being too mortified to pull a Barney Gumbel and loudly declare that this better be the best-tasting beer you've ever had and swig away.

Click here to buy The Stranger from Amazon.com
Click here to buy Through the Window Pane from Amazon.co.uk

Nicolas Makelberge, "Dying in Africa" (sung by Friday Bridge) - And of course because I couldn't possibly be content just posting eleven squillion words on shit your parents made you listen to, I feel compelled to also pass along this stately little gem from Nicolas Makelberge, the a-side to a recent split single with the Go! Team. I'm not going to pretend like I've ever heard of Makelberge before this single, partially because it's seven-thirty and I'm powerfully ready to stop writing and start eating and fucking myself up for the night but not insignificantly because I'd almost rather not have a context for songs like these; frankly, I'm still smarting from my self-regluing after investigating Imogen Heap beyond "Hide and Seek" to rush into that particular practice so quickly. Songs like this are fantastic because they just fill every scintilla of sonic space in your eardrums - and it's not even that they're necessarily filling it with music as much as that they're just keeping you on your toes. In the case of "Dying in Africa", you'll probably find your ears filled with the striking contrast between the corpulence of the low end and the nigh-unto-trance-diva-cheesiness of Friday Bridge's vocals; it's the kind of collision that keeps you coming back, like the sweetest car wreck you've ever imagined. (The "Dying in Africa"/"Western Song" single sold out within 24 hours, but you can still buy mp3s from Klicktrack, or you can buy Makelberge's full-length album Dying in Africa from Rico)