Renée, deliberately trying to provoke me into another blog posting, sent me this article from Slate in which Ron Rosenbaum claims that Billy Joel is the “worst pop singer ever.” There’s a great deal that can be said against Rosenbaum’s screed, such as:

1. •Rosenbaum’s claim that Billy Joel’s love songs are misogynist. Really? Because “Just the Way You Are” is unquestionably his most popular love song.  “I love you just the way yooooou arrrrre” is misogynist? Compared to, say, AC/DC? I mean, Back in Black came out in 1980, the same year as Glass Houses. Guess which one had the songs titled: “Shoot to Thrill,” “What Do You Do For Money, Honey?,” “Givin’ The Dog A Bone” (great lyrics), and my personal favorite, “Let Me Put My Love Into You”? Is it misogynist compared to the Commodores’ “Brick House,” another Billy Joel contemporary? Is “Uptown Girl” particularly misogynist? Terrible yes, but misogynist?)
   

2. •His overall approach is to claim that Billy Joel’s music is shallow, sentimental schlock and simultaneously that it fails to live up to its pretension to be great art, as when he mocks the re-issue of The Stranger for the oh-so-dramatic mask on the cover. (Note: literally judging the contents by the cover; Note: The Stranger always featured a mask on the cover; Note: Rock ‘n’ roll has pretty much always made adolescent angst and lust its bread and butter; Note: the cover of the re-issue is unchanged—the box that it comes in features a small version of the mask that was always on the cover) Did I miss the memo where Billy Joel claimed to be an artist? Doesn’t “Piano Man” pretty much stake the claim to be a mere entertainer?
   

3. •His central thesis is that the emotional core of Billy Joel’s music is “contempt.” Contempt for Roman Catholicism (!!) in “Only the Good Die Young.” Contempt for the lower middle-class in “Anthony’s Song” (sic, actually titled “Movin’ Out”). For Rosenbaum, what’s objectionable is not the contempt, but that Billy Joel hasn’t “earned” the contempt, though “cleverness and wit.” I find this claim, frankly, insane; Billy Joel’s music is hardly about contempt. As to earning the right to be contemptuous, I find that problematic, too—more on that below.
   

4. •Rosenbaum compares Billy Joel to Bob Dylan no fewer than three times in two pages, answering the question: “whom did you want to hear instead?” I submit that there is no comparison, not only in the sense that Rosenbaum means it, but also in the quite different sense that this is like complaining that your Avril Lavigne didn’t sound more like Bach, or that your corner store hamburger doesn’t taste like the dinner you had at El Bulli.
   

But the real turning point is when Rosenbaum asks himself, in a kind of fake interview, if there isn’t any Billy Joel song that he likes. He replies that there is, “The Longest Time.” Now, I’d be hard pressed to think of a Billy Joel song I dislike more that “Uptown Girl,” but I think “The Longest Time” just might be it. And I actually like earlier Billy Joel stuff—as a kid I remember really liking “Only the Good Die Young” for its anti-religious theme, not yet realizing that it was actually just a young man trying to find some way to convince the proverbial Catholic schoolgirl to have sex with him. Now that’s rock ‘n’ roll—the glorification of adolescent desire. There are other songs I like (“My Life,” “All for Leyna,” “Allentown”) and some that I dislike (“Everybody Has A Dream,” “Piano Man,” “Still Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me”) by Billy Joel, but that’s not the point. So here’s the big question:

Is taste just individual, idiosyncratic, an expression of personality, or perhaps an expression of cultural ideology (i.e., we think Bach is good because he represents certain cultural values we prize?)—or do our claims that a movie, a novel, or a song are good represent something else, something we could achieve consensus about? Is there any arguing about taste? Isn’t there something really pointless and futile about “worst pop singer ever” articles, or the endless top five lists generated by Rob and his buddies in High Fidelity? In fact, isn’t that basic impulse—to elaborate and schematize one’s taste—the fundamental impulse of all geeks everywhere? Geekiness has always just been a particular form of snobbery, of course (or perhaps the reverse). And one simply has to note that the defining feature of Rosenbaum’s critique is the same one that animates all geek critique, the very one Rosenbaum so weirdly lays at the feet of Billy Joel: unearned contempt.

Now, it’s very easy to say that Rosenbaum’s claims are just an expression of his particular tastes and not well founded in any kind of analysis. His last line is pretty clever, but his analysis ignores the historical context (back in the 1970s, Billy Joel was actually widely praised for writing rock music that had a working class sensibility, rather than: frivolous disco, equally mindless dinosaur rock (this one’s really worth watching), or unimaginably self-indulgent prog rock (this one’s good if you ever wondered where This is Spinal Tap came from)) and doesn’t exactly show a familiarity with the subject (the cover of The Stranger, the incorrect song title). I’ve long been a believer that contempt is a very weak position from which to write because, by definition, it involves a dismissal of the subject at hand. You can’t be open to your object of contempt; you can’t bother with it at all, in fact, and every attempt to justify your contempt will only become a re-iteration of the fact that you really, really don’t like it. And you will make mistakes and leave stuff out, because you cannot engage with the thing you hate. (I’ll leave the question of whether you can engage with the thing that you love for another post, but it presents different, and perhaps equal, problems.)

But I’m not contemptuous of Rosenbaum’s analysis: in fact, I’m deeply sympathetic to it, having spent an unfortunately large portion of my life being contemptuous of what failed to live up to my taste. I doubt very much that I could do any better in my analysis of why Jim Morrison is “the worst pop singer ever,” or “why the Cure isn’t music, but just awful noise.” I spent a long time loving Phil Collins and hating Prince. Now those tastes are reversed, and yet I am not a better or a worse person for it. Many of you will say that I am better, but I am not—you just happen to agree with this new alignment of my tastes.

And yet, for a final dialectical shift, aren’t some things simply bad or good, regardless of taste? (Kant, anyone?) Isn’t Bush simply “the worst president ever”? And isn’t—objectively speaking—Phil Collins worse in every way than Billy Joel? I hate The Doors a lot more than either of them, but I’m guessing Phil Collins is objectively worse (measured in, say, squandered talent and degree of general musical whorishness). Isn’t Shakespeare good? Anyone want to speak out against the Beatles? (And “overrated” is not allowed.) Why is it that we can sometimes elicit a consensus on literature, but hardly ever on music? Who or what would you nominate as the worst pop music? Worst song ever? Unarguably good musical moments?

I have decided that when I write my devastating tell-all roman-à-clef about the sordid lives of Urbana-Champaign faculty, it will feature an Italian restaurant called “Dream The Impastable Dream.”

Jim says non-ironic Journey is a “gray area,” but I think he’s just being kind. In that hopeful spirit of altruism, allow me to share this great photo of Obama on his way to the inaugural ball, stepping out of the elevator, clearly after having had one or two (not that he’s into excess, goodness knows):

And the often-brilliant xkcd has its own take on the inauguration: