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'd have to disagree that Joel overwrites - the main problem with his stuff, the reason he's inconsistent, is underwriting, and that was getting worse throughout the eighties
Which is why I was referring specifically to his work in the early 1970s—Cold Spring Harbor, Piano Man, Turnstiles and the like.
Incidentally, Jack - fine if you think pop doesn't miss the man, and when does it ever miss anyone, but give the underinformed rubbish a rest, yes? The guy's frequently said that he doesn't have anything left to say in pop/rock n' roll music, and was suffering from writer's block for years before managing to get enough material together for River Of Dreams.
Mm. "Good riddance" wasn't precisely what I meant to say—and for the record, I think Joel's presence is missed in the adult-pop landscape, particularly his gifts as a melodist—but there is something that troubles me about his "retirement" and subsequent self-reinvention.
Of course the man's entitled to try something new; that's one of the prerogatives of art. But there's still a cognitive dissonance in the way he's done it that I find jarring—particularly when I look at a figure like, say, John Cale, who has throughout his career embraced both "serious" music and dirtyass rock'n'roll, switching between them frequently and seamlessly, and never giving the impression that he's slumming in either genre.
That Billy Joel could announce that he was tapped out as a pop musician, that he had "nothing left to say," and then turn his hand to composition of chamber music, seems odd to me. It seems to devalue both pop and "serious" music. Chamber music is cast as what you write when you can no longer write pop music: Is it "easier," somehow? Yet there's more than a whiff of self-importance in the presentation—that faux-Schirmer-folio CD cover, even if meant as a joke, still feels like a decisive (and defensive) repudiation of his pop-musician past.
That's how it feels to me, anyway. And, given that Joel has had considerable triumphs in the pop field from which he is so eager to distance himself, while his accomplishments in the world of "serious" music have been, well, limited... well, it rubbed me the wrong way.
And name-calling ill befits you. |
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