IT'S BETTER THAN DRINKIN' ALONE: The Official ILM Track-by-Track BILLY JOEL Listening Thread

oh, we'll be getting to garth shortly...

meanwhile though i do have to share this bit from the Sirius chatter for this album, in between his fond, gross memories of the photoshoot for that sleeve: "I wanted to write a song about, uh you know, gossip columns... Henley did it with uh, 'Dirty Laundry,' and my way of doing it was, 'That's Not Her Style.'"

haha welp that makes sense, not quite as acidic or memorable as dirty laundry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqkjYKUXERQ

We Didn't Start the Fire, the lead single from Storm Front, was a worldwide smash. Billy claims the song was inspired by turning forty and learning from Sean Lennon that younger acquaintances believed that "nothing happened" during his childhood in the fifties. (I prefer my reading of it as a (somewhat garbled) attempt to argue that credit and blame for the tumult and transformation of the postwar world should be given not to the Boomers but to the graying authority-figure generations born as early as the 1860s.) Over at One Final Serenade, our attention is drawn to this short clip, which at 1:11 features Billy explaining that the song began life as a love song called "Jolene." This is one of many, many clips you can find where Joel, true to form, disparages the melody as a monotonous nothing.

Nonetheless, with the help of a memorable video, it made the Top 10 in a string of countries, and dethroned "Blame it on the Rain" to become Billy's third (and, to date, final) American #1 for two weeks in December 1989. Nominated for the Grammy for Record of the Year, along with "The End of the Innocence," "She Drives Me Crazy," and "The Living Years," it lost to "Wind Beneath My Wings." Finally, it should be said that it probably has more dedicated ILX threads than any other Billy Joel song. I for one will remember "children of the Federline" long after I'd have had any other reason to recall the existence of Kevin Federline.

https://img.discogs.com/VY0cTdlh3Gvbld3x68IO7LwEB2M=/fit-in/590x578/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-386058-1373232765-1859.jpeg.jpg

https://img.discogs.com/dTFIa0plvRsQUKMFv1lFA-_iKmk=/fit-in/455x452/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-2292562-1274893604.jpeg.jpg

Old BJ has nothing to say here. There’s no point, no sentiment - just an arbitrary list of nouns that just barely work together sonorously. He’s not a writer, he’s a typist.

This is wrong

Not going to comment on this now, because Billy over breakfast has become a comforting ritual that I realize I am going to have to give up soon enough, but I am genuinely excited to hear people's thoughts on this one (calstars getting us off to a good start here).

i think my great love of this song stems principally from my instinctive feeling that they do work together sonorously. when all else fails, it is just incredibly fun to tumble through the syllables of this thing, and there is real craft in making the selections and the sequence i think. if you imagine scrambling the order of any verse it just doesn't work as well even when it fits the meter - somehow "davy crockett, peter pan, elvis presley, disneyland" is better than "elvis presley, disneyland, davy crockett, peter pan." it is a shame that the only way he can add variety is to switch to the INTENSE delivery for certain stanzas culminating in the stop-and-start-over moments (BELGIANS IN THE CONGOOO!). as with the last song, it'd be nice to hear a real idea for a bridge, or a memorable and creative solo, or something.

the credits on this, reflecting the period overstuffing that we already heard on "that's not her style," include two additional keyboardists, plus someone who did "sound effects and arrangements." it may be significant that these first three tracks were mixed by tom lord-alge, who'd engineered or co-produced steve winwood's big albums, and would go on to work on a million big 90s records (alt rock, pop-punk, boy bands, marilyn manson, throwing copper...).

also, i missed some other grammy noms! mick and billy were nominated for producer of the year (losing to quincy jones). this song was nominated additionally for best male pop vocal performance (it lost to michael bolton's "how am i supposed to live without you" though i must say roy orbison's "you got it" was robbed). the song of the year category duplicates the record of the year results, with "don't know much" as performed by ronstadt and neville taking the place of "she drives me crazy."

sorry guys, i’ve been neglecting this thread too much of late!!

I used to love this song as a kid. Things! A list of things! And I liked stumbling on the things that were mentioned in the song later in school or books etc.

These days I find it more maddening than anything, the RAT TAT RAT TAT TAT cadence of it & the constant intensity, there’s no respite.

I find myself wondering now about what didnt get included, or what didnt fit, etc, the editorial choices in crafting the final song

Speaking of songs that emphasize what I don't like about Billy Joel, this is probably #1. Same repetitive structure as Piano Man: about halfway through the song, I think it's the last verse, when there's like three more left to go. Chorus is instantly catchy, like an advertisement. Oh, and sports references I don't care about elevated to the level of JFK's assassination. All that said, it's not horrible but there's something about it that rubs me the wrong way, like it was calculated to be huge. and I felt that way even before my history teacher (and probably every other history teacher) turned it into an entire lesson one class

Maybe calculated isn't the right word, because this doesn't really sound like any other pop song ever

List of nouns? Well. So is "Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs, birthday party cheesecake" etc.

I hate this song but for different reasons. Mostly because we already suffocate beneath a wet fetid blanket of Boomer nostalgia; there are so many of them; they never shut up about themselves and their fucking memories; and they clearly think they invented youth and mass culture and rebellion and social justice. I never thought they started the fire so I didn't need to be told that they hadn't. This song isn't a refutation of their self-absorption; it's Exhibit 1 for the prosecution.

Oh and the annoying insanely repetitive guitar line and the frenetic percussion. And the way it has been maniacally overplayed and overexposed just rubs vinegar in the abrasion of my annoyance with it.

“List of nouns? Well. So is "Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs, birthday party cheesecake" etc.”

Hey I’m not defending REM either. But at least the chorus on that one has some pathos.

I hate this song but for different reasons. Mostly because we already suffocate beneath a wet fetid blanket of Boomer nostalgia; there are so many of them; they never shut up about themselves and their fucking memories; and they clearly think they invented youth and mass culture and rebellion and social justice. I never thought they started the fire so I didn't need to be told that they hadn't. T

While I hate this song too (it sounds ugly), I think you've misread it. The chorus acknowledges that the boomers didn't start the fire – there's a big old world beyond the 20th century, and Joel suggests he could do a "Queen Victoria Abe Lincoln/Crimean War, H.L. Mencken" for other decades.

fwiw, I played this song for my 7 year old and she LOVED it, esp the chorus which she was instantly singing along to

I don't know if We Didn't Start the Fire is good or bad but I'm glad it exists and I couldn't imagine a world in which it didn't

also speaking of REM did Billy ever cop to hearing It's the End of the World as We Know It or is it a case of both of them separately tying to rip off Subterranean Homesick Blues?

also my final thought is that everyone focuses on the verses but I'd suggest there's something about the vocal melody of the chorus that has been influential with the sort of inspirational yodelly indie that turns up in commercials a lot

inspirational yodelly indie that turns up in commercials a lot

Lumineers / Mumford?

Is this the only pop song ever to mention Dien Bien Phu?

Nominated for the Grammy for Record of the Year, along with "The End of the Innocence," "She Drives Me Crazy," and "The Living Years," it lost to "Wind Beneath My Wings."

Terrifying to think Henley might be the best out of this particular slate of songs.

what else does he have to say

As I've likely made painfully obvious on this thread, I'm a bit of a stan for WMJ. You could say I'd even listen to a record of him reading the phone book. Ergo...

I mean, every single criticism made about this song is OTM. It pardons the Boomers. It's a laundry list of groceries. It's got way too much synth and panned stereo effects.

But it's also a cool experiment that works. It's got rhythm and meter and rhyme. Listen, as someone who likely struggled for 35 minutes to come up with "9/11, Anthrax Scare / Global Warming, Polar Bear" on one of those threads Dr. Casino mentions, taking global events from the mid-20th Century and turning them into a campfire song is no easy task. And thanks to Joel, there's a whole generation of kids now that know about Panmunjom, for better or for worse.

Yeah, he's just reciting names, but I've always been struck by how he phrases/purrs "Dy-lan, BURR-lin, Bay of Pigs invasion." This easily could've been turned into some Adult Contemporary version of a Negativeland song (which now that I've written that, I would really like to hear), but he brought more into it than a cut-and-paste song.

We've talked about the trajectory of his "persona" - going from lonesome songwriter to getting-laid rockstar. This was the point where this persona started to disappear. There's no compassion or humanity in his final No. 1 song. In the video, his eyes are covered, just like the corpse with the pennies on its eyes. He's an unacknowledged ghost in the presence of this family going through the ages. At one point, Joel almost literally melts into the background. Where does he go from here.

what else does he have to say

Backing up to say VegemiteGrrl is spot on here:

the RAT TAT RAT TAT TAT cadence of it & the constant intensity, there’s no respite

interesting! and yet, the detached observer/reporter was once his comfort zone as a lyricist: piano man, miami 2017, etc. more frequently, though, he was the *judging* observer (aka the whining stranger) with perhaps a small stake in the situation, and that has faded here with an explicit refusal to editorialize. bizarrely, the method now reminds me of foucault or benjamin: just getting a bunch of elements side by side, and trusting the reader to draw conclusions. what else do i have to say?!

i do think it'd be a stronger, if glummer, song if he purged the sports figures and other lighter fare in favor of more chaos, oppression and, basically, fire. surely "mcnamara" would sound good to this rhythm. at the same time, once you have CHUBBY CHECKER PSY-CHO!! on tape how do you hit the erase button?

the oft-observed blitzing past the 70s reflects a more fundamental problem of historiography; our lived past slips through our fingers. he must have been very relieved to realize "woodstock" rhymed with "punk-rock!" and he could just dodge this whole chapter. if only he'd thought of "oil shock" maybe he could have put on the brakes and gotten more into the urban crises and retrenchment of the right wing (for whom reagan and bernie goetz are surrogates i suppose). but then again, active consideration of the struggles of the 70s is for chumps - angry young men, they're called.

if he purged the sports figures and other lighter fare

Maybe, but that would not make sense. For Joel, culture and life are inextricably intertwined. I mean, he already told us his reasons for the whole revival. Condoms and mints and fashion and sex and music and street fights and stickball etc., are all of a piece in the church of Billyism. He can't separate Castro from Marilyn from the Beatles from the Berlin Wall because it's all glommed together in a carapace of memory.

tldr: If his past is something that never got in his way, then why can he not ever shut up about it?

He can't separate Castro from Marilyn from the Beatles from the Berlin Wall because it's all glommed together in a carapace of memory.

Exactly. The song isn't about privileging actual history over pop culture or anything like that, but rather about the experience of what it must have been like to have been born in 1949 and grow up with all of this swirling around you. Think of the song as a less insulting (and less maudlin) Forrest Gump: while that film tries to wring condescending laughs and pathos from a portrait of a hero unable to comprehend the weight of the history that informs his experience, this song is about the conscious attempt to make sense of the dizzying experience of it all.

And besides, do you really want to hear what a millennial version of this would sound like...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_16Ws1vYoc0

Fidget spinner, health care plan,
Will & Grace is back again
Bump stocks, Rand Paul,
Charlie Rose misconduct

ughhhhh i think that showed up on the "so appalled" thread that year but i'd managed to forget it.

emphatically not calling for an updated version, to be clear!

i think the mishmash version is okay, but it's still undermined by a lack of formal consistency. joel has never been the greatest at making sure his songs stay on topic. as with "my life" and some others, this doesn't ruin the song for me, but maybe setting some kind of limits on himself would have been productive here. okay, it's about the experience of living through that time and making sense of it... that's fine, and kind of neat, in that this mishmash really may be the things that jumped out from the headlines and lodged themselves in the imagination as traumas or fascinations alike. but did the deaths of josef stalin, prokofiev, and santayana really register with billy at age four? clearly at some point he had "marciano, liberace, SANTAYANA GOODBYE" and wasn't about to walk away from it. not complaining exactly since it's great, but....

the experience of what it must have been like to have been born in 1949 and grow up with all of this swirling around you

Which is, like literally, the MOST WELL-DOCUMENTED TOPIC IN AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY.

Like Doctor C., it's not that I want people born in 1969 or 1974 or 1983 to have a song about how it felt to be born then.

Rather, that people born 194x have been cluttering the airways with their self-absorbed bullshit nonstop since 196x. I might not have been sick of it in 1989, but I'm certainly sick of it now.

And note that John F. Kennedy was born in 1917; Fidel Castro and Marilyn Monroe were both born in 1926. But they're not seen as cultural products of those inter-war generations. Nooooooo. They are seen as the cultural property of Boomers, because they were instrumental in forming the construct of "Boomer memory," a.k.a, the blanket that still suffocates American culture to a bizarre degree.

Whether it's the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan, these fuckers take EVERYTHING that happened in the mid-20th century and make it All About Them.

right - and billy's point is that they're wrong!

or, as i tried to put it a few years back:

You know, the sound of the syllables is really great on this, and it could be a genuinely cool song if Joel had stuck closer to the premise: not saying we Boomers are any great shakes, but just to be clear, we got all rebellious because the world as delivered to us was already fucked up, divided and violent. Not a Forrest Gump "journey through the postwar decades!" history, but a preemptive strike against easy "Greatest Generation" valorization of the graying technocrats, warmongers and consumerist policymakers that set the terms of the postwar struggles and were still hanging around in positions of real power. It gets totally garbled up by including all these boomer-era pros and cons and/or pleasant bequests from older generations (is Buddy Holly really so destructive? Toscanini?), but then, it'd be hard to purge some of those rhymes once they'd made it in.

― Doctor Casino, Sunday, September 7, 2014 2:52 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Doctor, if that was his point, his point has been irrevocably lost, because everyone turns to this song as a yet another catalog of inescapable, ever-present Boomer memory.

The final truth is he did NOT write a song about Honus Wagner, Teapot Dome, Edward's Abdication. Nor did he write one about the Wars of the Roses, the Trail of Tears, the Protestant Reformation, or for that matter about Pac-Man and Max Headroom. Though he could have!

He wrote instead about the same ten things everyone his age will never, ever shut up about.

Shit, now I have the bug:

Honus Wagner, Teapot Dome
Barbarians are sacking Rome
Comets kill the dinosaurs
I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE

it's true; every thanksgiving dinner all through my childhood, it was just endless discussions of nasser's pan-arabism, the rockefeller divorce, toscanini's conducting career, and the epochal death of george santanyana. get over yourselves already!

Is 'I can't take it anymore!' a reference to Network?

rock and roller cola wars iirc

xp If it is, it's out of chronology, right?

Fair point and solid burn, Doc. You are right to point that there are a lot of things in there and they're not just "Happy Days" style Boomer hobbyhorses.

If I understand you correctly, you take him at his word on the political message: stuff was already fucked up and it will continue to be.

Okay. In that reading, McCarthy and Nasser and Reagan and the Cold War are the meat of the argument; Rocky Marciano or Toscanini or whatever are just filler words that happen to fit, like Sussudio or "scrambled eggs."

I think my reading is more cynical. To me, Truman and Malenkov and the Belgians are the vaguely topical nouns that happened to work in the scheme. To me, Dylan and Marilyn and Elvis and Studebakers are where his heart lies, and the political/social message is secondary.

That message is there, but many of the song's references aee no deeper than "a mint called Sen-Sen."

I totally get being burnt out on Boomer self-importance, but I think that "We Didn't Start the Fire" benefited from timing, for me. It was more part of my "learning about boomers" experience than my (admittedly much longer) getting sick of hearing about every boomer cultural touchstone experience. That came more in the 90s, with every other movie that Tom Hanks was in, the Beatles Anthology special, etc.

i think it was somewhere on an ilx thread i realized for the first time that this song was chronological! swear i never twigged.

YMP, I more or less agree actually! Hence my desire to swap some of the less-considered nouns for things that really seal the deal. (I do think Truman and the Belgians are totally on topic - I mean if you want to talk about the world being screwed up by the greying establishment, the Cold War and colonialism are pretty important!) But I'm also just more tolerant of it even with its failings cause I love the sound of the words he chose to put together, as much as I do "bought an apartment with deep-pile carpets."

I also think of boomer humorist Dave Barry's complaint that in junior high and high school history class, it seemed like every year you started at the dawn of time and got right up to Harry Truman before school was out for the summer. That still seemed apt to me in the 90s! So if some of the touchstones have been endlessly mulled over, others were probably obscure throwbacks even to Joel's generational peers. A bit of "Do You Remember These" or "Pencil Thin Mustache," which are both probably a bit closer to the coherent nostalgia qualities of "a mint called Sen-Sen." (I actually brought up both of those songs a while back in defense of Stranger Things as being far from unprecedented in its backwards-looking melange; now I wonder how much distaste for that show correlates with distaste for WDSTF.)

Is this the least character-sketch of all his songs? It’s unabashedly a song, where the “I” in “I can’t take it anymore” is just a line in the song instead of a person/a, and the we is no more specific than a collective generation.

The worst parts of this song is when he breaks character. What else do I have to say? I can't take it anymore!

And it wasn't until I got to 40 that I sympathized with him jumping from Woodstock to punk rock to "the cola wars". If I was to write one of these, it would be thick with references until about 1995. Then it would go more along the lines of "West Wing, Iraq Invasion. Bruno Mars, Air Malaysian..."

i actually don't hate this song at all. i wasn't old enough to register its omnipresence on radio, and when i finally encountered the song later in life i found it oddly fascinating? just this collision of historical nouns married to a chorus my interpretation of which exactly matches doctor casino's. i listened to it this morning and i was like "yeah i can see what drew me to it." i nearly bought storm front as a kid on the basis of "fire"

DONALD TRUMP
WHAT A CHUMP
WONCHA BITE'EM IN THE RUMP

i guess he played it at the only billy joel show i attended in my life, when i was seven years old, but i didn't actually think about the song until i was 11 or 12 https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/elton-john-and-billy-joel/1995/mgm-grand-garden-arena-las-vegas-nv-23da687f.html

Have we discussed this song's legacy as a middle-school history project for the post-Gen X, pre-millennial generation yet? My seventh grade class was one of those tasked with researching the events mentioned in the song; I dug it, but nobody in my class seemed to think either the song or the project was all that cool, because we weren't doing a song by MC Hammer or something.

I was spared such assignments, despite being in the right age bracket at the right time. I consider myself fortunate.