Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless. I once spent an evening chatting about the complexity of modern relationships with a male acquaintance, his ex-girlfriend, and her roommate. When I went to bed that night, I thought our conversation had been wonderful. Twelve hours later, I was informed that the ex-girlfriend spent the entire evening “in a rage,” apparently because the other male in our foursome had been “brooding and surly,” creating a tension that subsequently made the ex-girlfriend’s roommate “completely uncomfortable” with the nature of our dialogue. I never noticed any of this. I never have any idea how other people feel; they always appear fine to me. But if somebody had pointedly played Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” that night, I’m sure I could have constructed some empathy.
4 Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink 0:42
Several months before nineteen unsmiling people from the Middle East woke up early on a Tuesday in order to commit suicide by flying planes into tall New York office buildings, I sent out a mass e-mail to several acquaintances that focused on the concept of patriotism. At the time, “patriotism” seemed like a quaint, baffling concept; it was almost like asking people to express their feelings on the art of blacksmithing. But sometimes I like to ask people what they think about blacksmithing, too.
So ANYWAY, here was the content of my e-maiclass="underline" I gave everyone two potential options for a hypothetical blind date and asked them to pick who they’d prefer. The only things they knew about the first candidate was that he or she was attractive and successful. The only things they knew about the second candidate was that he or she was attractive, successful, and “extremely patriotic.” No other details were provided or could be ascertained.
Just about everyone immediately responded by selecting the first individual. They viewed patriotism as a downside. I wasn’t too surprised; in fact, I was mostly just amused by how everyone seemed to think extremely patriotic people weren’t just undateable, but totally fucking insane. One of them wrote that the quality of “patriotism” was on par with “regularly listening to Cat Stevens” and “loves Robin Williams movies.” Comparisons were made to Ted Nugent and Patrick Henry. And one especially snide fellow sent back a mass message to the entire e-mail group, essentially claiming that any woman who loved America didn’t deserve to date him, not because he hated his country but because patriotic people weren’t smart.
That last response outraged one of my friends, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer who had been the only individual in the entire group who claimed to prefer the extremely patriotic candidate to the alternative. He sent me one of the most sincerely aggravated epistles I’ve ever received, and I still recall a segment of his electronic diatribe that was painfully accurate: “You know how historians call people who came of age during World War II ‘the greatest generation’? No one will ever say that about us,” he wrote. “We’ll be ‘the cool generation.’ That’s all we’re good at, and that’s all you and your friends seem to aspire to.”
What’s kind of ironic about this statement is that I think my lawyer friend was trying to make me reevaluate the state of my life, but it mostly just made me think about Billy Joel. Nobody would ever claim that Billy Joel is cool in the conventional sense, particularly if they’re the kind of person who actively worries about what coolness is supposed to mean. Billy Joel is also not cool in the kitschy, campy, “he’s so uncool he’s cool” sense, which also happens to be the most tired designation in popular culture. He has no intrinsic coolness, and he has no extrinsic coolness. If cool was a color, it would be black—and Billy Joel would be sort of burnt orange.
Yet Billy Joel is great. And he’s not great because he’s uncool, nor is he great because he “doesn’t worry about being cool” (because I think he kind of does). No, he’s great in the same the way that your dead grandfather is great. Because unlike 99 percent of pop artists, there is absolutely no relationship between Joel’s greatness and Joel’s coolness (or lack thereof), just as there’s no relationship between the “greatness” of serving in World War II and the “coolness” of serving in World War II. What he does as an artist wouldn’t be better if he was significantly cooler, and it’s not worse because he isn’t. And that’s sort of amazing when one considers that he’s supposedly a rock star.
For just about everybody else in the idiom of rock, being cool is pretty much the whole job description. It’s difficult to think of rock artists who are great without being cool, since that’s precisely why we need them to exist. There have been countless bands in rock history—T. Rex, Jane’s Addiction, the White Stripes, et al.—who I will always classify as “great,” even though they’re really just spine-crushingly “cool.” What they are is more important than what they do. And this is not a criticism of coolness; by and large, the musical component of rock isn’t nearly as important as the iconography and the posturing and the idea of what we’re supposed to be experiencing. If given the choice between hearing a great band and seeing a cool band, I’ll take the latter every single time; this is why the Eagles suck. But it’s the constraints of that very relationship that give Billy Joel his subterranean fabulousity, and it’s why he’s unassumingly superior to all his mainstream seventies peers who got far more credit (James Taylor, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen, etc.). Joel is the only rock star I’ve ever loved who I never wanted to be (not even when he was sleeping with Christie Brinkley). Every one of Joel’s important songs—including the happy ones—are ultimately about loneliness. And it’s not “clever lonely” (like Morrissey) or “interesting lonely” (like Radiohead); it’s “lonely lonely,” like the way it feels when you’re being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: What about that godawful current events song that seemed like a rip-off of R.E.M. (1989’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”)? What’s lonely about that, you ask? Well, my response is simple—I don’t count that song. I don’t count anything that comes after his An Innocent Man album, and I barely count that one. And aesthetically, this is totally acceptable. Unless they die before the age of thirty-three, nobody’s entire career matters, and we all unconsciously understand this. If you’re trapped in a Beatles-Stones debate, it’s not like anybody tries to prove a point by comparing Help! to Steel Wheels. BlackSabbath is the most underrated band in rock history, and that designation isn’t weakened by 1994’s Cross Purposes. Even guys who make relatively important albums in the twilight of their artistic life—most notably Bob Dylan and Neil Young—are granted unlimited lines of critical credit simply for not making albums that are completely terrible. The unspoken (though much-denied) conceit of everybody who loves rock ’n’ roll is that nobody old and rickety can be relevant at all, so anything remotely close to social consequence is akin to genius; that’s why Love and Theft was classified as “classic” in 2001, even though it would have been nothing more than “solid” in 1976. So no one is denying that Billy Joel has put out crap for as many years as he put out quality. But it doesn’t matter, because he never had the responsibility of staying cool. His crappiest albums (The Bridge, River of Dreams, etc.) can just be separated out and ignored entirely. Unlike Lou Reed or David Bowie, “Billy Joel” is not a larger pop construct or an expansive pop idea. Billy Joel is just a guy. And that’s why—unlike someone like Jeff Buckley—his records wouldn’t seem any better if he was dead.