OT - What makes me hate Billy Joel?

[QuikSand]

Wandering through the grocery store the other day, I heard them piping in a Billy Joel song. Without giving it any thought, I was mouthing a few of the familiar words... and then I basicaly caught myself and said "No, no no - I hate billy Joel." (Not out loud, mind you - I didn't want to disturbe the produce section)

But it got me to thinking. There's nothing inherently objectionable to me about Billy Joel and his music, I don't think. It's not really the genre of music that I prefer, but there is certainly a long, long list of things that I dislike much more intensely than his music.

But I'm pretty firm on this - I hate Billy Joel.


Wonder why that is. In his specific case, there seems to be a lot of material to work with. Is it the undying admiration of zealotous fans, who think he's the second coming? Is it the whole Christie Brinkley thing - some kind of weird supermodel jealousy on my part? Is it the fact that he shifted his music around that time and created some stuff that I really hate like "Uptown Girl" and "An Innocent Man?" Is it the unctious holier-than-pop attitude now, as he fancies himself a composer for the ages, and not just a famous musician? The list just goes on and on.

Specific question: what is it about Billy Joel?
General question: why do semi-irrational likes and dislikes happen like this?

Discuss.

[cuervo72]

Do you have any general ill-feelings towards New York, or things New York?

[cthomer5000]

Oh my god, i'm not the only one. For years I have literally ranted and raved about how his songs aren't all that bad really - but hearing his music actually causes a physical reaction in me. I swear I feel my blood pressure and anger rising.

[QuikSand]

Originally Posted by cthomer5000

Oh my god, i'm not the only one. For years I have literally ranted and raved about how his songs aren't all that bad really - but hearing his music actually causes a physical reaction in me. I swear I feel my blood pressure and anger rising.

That's pretty much me, too. I'd actualy say that Allentown could have been a song that I'd really like - were it not by him. ::shiver::

[QuikSand]

Originally Posted by cuervo72

Do you have any general ill-feelings towards New York, or things New York?

I don't think so... but it's at least as viable as some of the things I speculated above.

[Fritz]

he's a fucking pianist. thats it. Rock and roll people need to play guitar or something. If you are a pianist, you are nothing more than a 2 bit lounge monkey that made good.

[rkmsuf]

Has to be heavily influced by seeing this very average joe get Brinkley. Combine that with not particularly liking the music and you better hope you never run into him or you may recieve a nice vacation package from the US courts...

[cthomer5000]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

General question: why do semi-irrational likes and dislikes happen like this?

We probably all have a list of likes and dislikes that we can pretty much admit are overblown or semi-irrational. For me, getting my haircut is certainly on that list, and i actually started a thread about irrational hatreds/fears some months ago.

I guess part of it tends to be something you can put your finger on, but then there is also just some inexpressable "gut feeling" involved there. Like, I get the feeling Billy Joel just needs a good punch in the face - and I'd love to give it to him. Something about the guy as a whole just angers me.

Quik - you also should've included the obnoxious "We Didn't Start the Fire" in that pairing of specific songs.

[cthomer5000]

And I always want to hurt someone when i hear the radio kick in with "A bottle of red.... A bottle of white..."

I'm getting angry just thinking about this.

[QuikSand]

Originally Posted by cthomer5000

Like, I get the feeling Billy Joel just needs a good punch in the face - and I'd love to give it to him. Something about the guy as a whole just angers me.

Yes Yes.

(This is going in the wrong direction, of course)

[Ksyrup]

Billy got screwed over by that whore. Plus, he got hosed by his accountant/manager and lost pretty much everything he made early in his career. That almost makes up for the fact that he stole River of Dreams. Almost.

My wife loves the guy. I like some of it, but I hate the "NY state of mind" type crap. I will never be in a NY state of mind, and the fact that he is/was, means that I can never fully appreciate him.

I have a hatred of pretty much all music not written by the band/artist performing it. I won't call it "irrational," because it's perfectly rational to me, but it doesn't matter who it is or what kind of music, I have a hard time letting go. Even a band that just covers someone else's song, I have rules for "acceptance" of the artist. If it's a one-off type thing, or on a tribute, or part of a covers album/theme, then I can be OK with it. If it's the first single for some band, forget about it. They could write Sgt. Pepper's Part II and I'd never give them the time of day. Examples off the top of my head: Orgy and Alien Ant Farm. I was very conflicted when Living Colour got back together, then recording and released Back In Black. had it not been for their stellar catalog, they'd have been out of my mind.

Anyway, to try to answer your question, in my case, I obviously attach significance to whether an artist can write music. And the fact that someone has to resort to performing another's song, tells me that that artist has very little to offer. So, perhaps you have a specific dislike/hatred that Billy Joel is attached to or personifies, and his music triggers that hatred and you transfer that hatred to him specifically.

[cthomer5000]

Reading the first post here was one of those moments in my life where I feel like someone else has literally copied the thoughts out of my brain, then presented them to me.

Anyway, as to where these feelings come from (not specific anti-Billy Joel feelings)... I'm largely clueless. Thinking specifically about Billy Joel, for me personalle, I think a lot of it may have to with the fact that when I meet people who are fans of his - I generally dislike them. I don't even know if the the hatred of Billy Joel is the cause of me disliking these them, or whether meeting these people I don't like who are big Billy Joel fans has made me hate him.

I think for most people though, it's possible these "third party" feelings, memories, issues have caused them to focus their dislike onto a single person/place/activity.

[3ric]

Well, Ric Ocasek (sp?) is married to Paulina Porizkova and that's not enough to invoke such anger. I think it's the pretentiousness in Joel's actions that fuels the negative feelings, a similar case can be made for Sting. Great musician, but continually gets bad reviews that focus more on his "holier-than-thou save the rainforest while having tantric sex" reputation...

[Desnudo]

Another possibility might be because he has had so many songs that have been in non-stop radio rotation for so long. I think it was "We Didn't Start the Fire" for me.

[Easy Mac]

I think the answer to the question is that he undeniably sucks.

[Desnudo]

That's another possibility.

[cthomer5000]

Originally Posted by Desnudo

Another possibility might be because he has had so many songs that have been in non-stop radio rotation for so long. I think it was "We Didn't Start the Fire" for me.

There may be something to this as well. Because at the height of his popularity (I'd say immediately post "We Didn't Start the Fire" until "River of Dreams), he was the type of radio artist that crossed over to nearly all formats. In the NYC radio area, his songs would get played on the classic rock stations, top 40 stations, and adult contemporary stations. You pretty much heard it every minute of the day.

[AgPete]

muwahahahaahahahah

Artist: Billy Joel
Song: We Didnt Start The Fire

Lyrics:

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe


Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, The King and I and The Catcher in the Rye


Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye


CHORUS
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it


Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser aand Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc


Roy hn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron
Dien Bien Phu falls, Rock Around the Clock


Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland


Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, trouble in the Suez


CHORUS


Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge on the River Kwai


Lebanon, Charlse de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide


Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, Mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go


U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo


CHORUS


Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion


Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson


Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say


CHORUS


Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodsto, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan


Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law
Rock and roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore


CHORUS


We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on, and on, and on, and on...

[3ric]

*slaps AgPete around a bit with a large trout*

[Desnudo]

Can I report that post? Agpete needs to be locked in a room with a looping tape of Piano Man.

[Subby]

There are a lot of guys/groups out there that might as well be two people as I love their old stuff and despise their new stuff.

Elton John, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, The Stones...singers/bands that were just so great but then MTV hit and they sold-out and are now just caricatures of themselves...trading on whatever small amount of respect still floats out there for them.

[AgPete]

Originally Posted by Desnudo

Can I report that post? Agpete needs to be locked in a room with a looping tape of Piano Man.

"Make it stop! Make it stop!"

[cthomer5000]

Originally Posted by Subby

Elton John, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, The Stones...singers/bands that were just so great but then MTV hit and they sold-out and are now just caricatures of themselves...trading on whatever small amount of respect still floats out there for them.

Me and my father have a running joke about how the Stones are now just "The world's best Rolling Stones cover band."

[cartman]

Don't any of you go changin', to try and please me.
None of you have let me down before

I took the good times (SkyDog's burning anus, the release of FOF4 crashing the board)
I'll take the bad times (Bragaddddoccccciooouuuss, any of the classic HM diatribes)
I'll take you all just the way you are

[condors]

my wife likes him and what bothers me about him....

he can't relate to the songs he is singing, allentown??? how could he relate to that? i will take you just the way you are? ummm your wife was hot bud

i think his whole deal is bogus. As a musician you should have feelings in your music and with him i think you would get more feeling from a dead rectual trout.

[albionmoonlight]

Originally Posted by condors

As a musician you should have feelings in your music and with him i think you would get more feeling from a dead rectual trout.

I think that that's a lot of it with him. You don't get the sense that he really beleives anything that he is singing.

That would not be so bad (nothing wrong with singing something that you don't feel), except for the fact that he pretendsto be all deep and into his music. Getting up there and singing "Who shot the Na Na" is fine when you are not pretending that you are doing anything other than making fun music. Singing something heartfelt and feeling it is fine, too. But pretending to be deeper than you are when you are just faking it comes off as . . . fake.

The best example (there are many) is that song "Downeaster Alexis" (or something like that) where he gives a psuedo-soul tribute mourning the loss of his life at sea.

And--part and parcel with this whole thing is his image of himself as a musical genius. Blech.

[Butter]

Originally Posted by cthomer5000

Like, I get the feeling Billy Joel just needs a good punch in the face - and I'd love to give it to him.

That's awesome.

[Desnudo]

Originally Posted by corbes

I've had this song in my head for a half hour now.

May you rot in hell and have maggots eat your intenstines for all of eternity.

Cartman didn't start the fire Corbes. It was always burning.

[rkmsuf]

Originally Posted by Desnudo

Cartman didn't start the fire Corbes. It was always burning.

And it goes on, and on and on...

[cuervo72]

Originally Posted by Fritz

he's a fucking pianist. thats it. Rock and roll people need to play guitar or something. If you are a pianist, you are nothing more than a 2 bit lounge monkey that made good.

Tori Amos?

(oh wait, you said rock).


And Subby, Aerosmith hasn't been ALL bad post Run DMC...songs like Rag Doll, Just Push Play, The Other Side, and even Dueces are Wild (Beavis and Butthead CD) are good. Well, at least for my questionable music tastes.

[MrBug708]

Don't click here then

[JeeberD]

Billy Joel fucking rocks. I love his music...

[rkmsuf]

"I ammmmmmmmm an innocent manananan...oh yes I ammmmmmmmmm...an innocent man."

[SackAttack]

Sorry, guys, I'm gonna hafta go with JeeberD on this one. I'll take Billy Joel and Elton John over that long-haired rocker crap any day.

[RendeR]

Umm....I'm not sure how well any of you really know Billy Joel. He wrote almost everything he ever recorded, with a few exceptions. He plays multiple instruments, he grew up in Queens I believe, in a poor neighborhood to a poor family.

As for not believing in the things he sings about...wow, there's some real assumption for you. There is an hour long biography on him that plays on E! and also VH1. I'd suggest that all of you actually watch it.

[cody8200]

I like two songs, piano man...honesty. That's it. I absolutely hate river of dreams or whatever that song was. ARGGGH. I cant stand Aerosmith anymore.

[rkmsuf]

As a public service...

http://members.optushome.com.au/styl...rob2/billy.htm

[cartman]

The board is frequently kind
And it's suddenly cruel
It can do as it pleases
It's nobody’s fool
But we can’t be convicted
We've earned our degree
And the most we will do
Is throw trout at you
But this always FOFC to me

[Ksyrup]

Originally Posted by RendeR

He wrote almost everything he ever recorded, with a few exceptions.

Not sure if that was directed at me, but I'm well aware of that. My comments were about things I hate in general (artists who don't write their own music), not having to do with Billy Joel.

Originally Posted by condors

he can't relate to the songs he is singing, allentown??? how could he relate to that? i will take you just the way you are? ummm your wife was hot bud

Who says you can't write about what your life used to be like? The guy grew up poor. If that was the test, then no country singers could write their stupid "workin' hard for a livin'" songs after they hit it big. Hey wait, we may be on to something... For some artists, that's their shtick. I don't see that being held against them.

As for his marriage to Brinkley, I'm fairly certain "I love you just the way you are" was written before they got together. Again, you're mixing and matching things that don't fit together to conform to some image you want to have of him.

As far as someone not really believing what they are singing...that's an awfully subjective thing. If he comes off that way to you, then there's not much the guy can do about it, is there? Personally, I've never felt that way about him; I just can't relate to a lot of his songs, so I prefer not to listen to him. His very being doesn't infuriate me like, say, Glen Frey.

[Vince]

Originally Posted by Fritz

he's a fucking pianist. thats it. Rock and roll people need to play guitar or something. If you are a pianist, you are nothing more than a 2 bit lounge monkey that made good.

I object. I'm a three bit lounge monkey, at least.

[Franklinnoble]

I dated a gal who was a Billy Joel fanatic once. She was a lunatic, and I get that chewing-on-tinfoil feeling in the back of my jaw whenever I think of her, or Billy Joel, for that matter.

[Fritz]

Originally Posted by RendeR

Umm....I'm not sure how well any of you really know Billy Joel. He wrote almost everything he ever recorded, with a few exceptions. He plays multiple instruments, he grew up in Queens I believe, in a poor neighborhood to a poor family.

As for not believing in the things he sings about...wow, there's some real assumption for you. There is an hour long biography on him that plays on E! and also VH1. I'd suggest that all of you actually watch it.

and Quik's evil ploy to flush out the Billy Joel fanboys starts to work...

[cartman]

Some folks like to get away, take a holiday from the Internet hood
Hop a flight to miami beach ('sup noop) or hollywood (hey Chief Rum).
I’m taking a greyhound on the Chattachoochee River line-
I’m in a FOFC state of mind.

[Buccaneer]

I love Piano Man and Goodnight Saigon, the rest is just NYC-style lounge lizard pop.

[Butter]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

His very being doesn't infuriate me like, say, Glen Frey.

The H is O!

[ISiddiqui]

Billy Joel fucking rocks. I love his music...

I agree! Y'all are just haters! That's right... haters!

[Buddy Grant]

Top 10 Reasons Why Billy Joel Does Not Rule
1. Billy Joel in his heyday was the type of pop entertainer your Sunday School teacher would listen to.
2. His music was depressing, so depressing that even if you liked Joel when he had the hits, you probably don't want to admit that or even remember those songs today.
3. The person that gave you a Billy Joel album for Christmas tended to be the person most out of touch with what young people liked and were listening too (I suspect a large portion of his album sales were to Grandparents who wanted to surprise their niece).
4. Unlike most pop stars, Billy Joel always looked about 10-15 years older than he really was. I imagine that was to better sell his image to the grandparent types mentioned in reason #3.
5. He looked like a beat walking policeman. I mean it is not nice to make fun of the way people look but come on, seriously, WTF.
6. Besides the out of touch grandparents in reason #3, the next biggest purchaser of Billy Joel albums must have been piano players that already had every Carpenters and Captain & Tenille album.
7. Music is a subjective thing. That being said, most of Billy Joel's songs were total shit.
8. His performances were depressing and boring. Most piano players acknowledge that watching someone play the piano is one of the most boring tasks you will encounter in life, and they go to great measures to try to distract you with either funny sunglasses (Elton John) or by playing the piano with their elbow (John Lennon) or feet (Jerry Lee Lewis). Billy Joel did not do any of those things. He just got over-the-top-emotional-artist who-looks-like-they-are-trying to-push-out-a-stubborn-bowel-movement. All the while looking like a cop, and sweating profusely, always with the profuse sweating.
9. When the piano teachers and grandparents had purchased all his albums already and sales began to fade he did not bow out gracefully, he forced one of the worst songs ever written on people as a bitter "fuck you" to the world: "We Didn't Start The Fire". No, I started the god damn fire. I did it because I thought Billy Joel was still in the stupid glass house!
10. In a desperate attempt to appeal to customers under the age of 55 he made an album with Cyndi Lauper.

Bonus reason: He made elevator music before there even was such a thing - just listen to his hit "Just The Way You Are" if you don't believe me.

[korme]

HOW.

Can you hate the Piano Man??

Captain Jack will get you by tonight.

[Maple Leafs]

I can't shake the feeling that this entire thread is a QuikSand experiment.

I bet I can post any random observation at FOFC, and dozens of posters will fall over each other to be the first to say "me too!". Let's test this hypothesis...

[korme]

To the tune of we didn't start the fire:

Mutton dagger,
Old blind Bob,
Hanging Johnny,
Fishing rod,
Tally wacker,
Pocket rocket,
One eyed trouser trout,
Ding dong,
Ankle spanker,
Pork sword,
Engine cranker,
Hairy hot dog,
Davy Cockett,
LET THEM ALL HANG OUT!

CHORUS-
Pet names for genitalia,
You know the girls think of 'em,
And you gotta love 'em!
Pet names for genitalia,
Theres always something silly
About little Willy!

Wang,
Wahzoo,
Weenie wacker,
Pecker,
Pee Pee,
Kidney cracker,
Heat seeking moisture missile,
Giggle stick,
Love whistle,
Tube steak,
Uncle Dick,
THIS IS GETTING REALLY SICK!
I'm not through,
There's ONE more,
PURPLE HELMET WARRIOR!