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

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.

I saw him in tenth grade on the seventh (!!) Miami night of the Storm Front tour. Cyndi Lauper appeared, vamping like Michelle Pfeiffer atop the piano. I don't know what she sang, not "Code of Silence". BJ was solicitous enough to set up keyboards on every corner of the stage so that people behind the stage and other cheap seat could see him.

Weinstein, Louis CK / what else do I have to say?

hey this is fun, I made one

Marlee Matlin, Informer Snow
Great British Baking Show
Colombia Signs A Peace Accord
I CANT TAKE THIS ANYMORE

I love how it's the FARC guerrilla war that made him crack.

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.

Similar experience. My 10th grade teacher spent the period breaking down the song piece by piece. We had just finished our unit on 60's/70's history so we had learned some of the references. The class seemed bored, because the song was already ten years old and unknown to most of the class. I may have been the only Billy Joel fan in the class and I didn't care much for it. If you've never heard of Billy Joel, this just seems like another educational song that you'd see on a PBS show

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LESFuoW-T7I

The Downeaster 'Alexa' sings the struggles of a Long Island fisherman and the titular boat, with shades of "Allentown," and Ithzak Perlman appearing on violin. The synthy quality makes me think of Monkey Island, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. As the fourth single off Storm Front, it peaked at #57 on the Hot 100 (#18 on Adult Contemporary), and maybe got to #6 in Japan although Wiki can't agree with itself about that. The UK 12" is another wacky EP of Joel classics, with "An Innocent Man," "I've Loved These Days," and "Streetlife Serenader." The UK CD single swaps in an extra live version of "Downeaster," plus "Allentown" (fair enough) and, no joke, "Worse Comes To Worst," mislabeled as "Worse Comes to the Worst." Who was putting these things together?

The video shows Billy hanging around the pier, pretending to play the accordion part actually played by Dominic Cortese.

Says Wiki:

Joel was always sympathetic to the hard working men who worked the sea, even getting arrested during a protest supporting the Baymen. At one point Joel had underwritten a plan by his young boat captain to use his boat (Alexa Ray, a 46' custom downeaster) as a commercial fishing and charter fishing operation. As the two developed the plan, it became increasingly clear that the challenges facing a small commercial operation were greater than he had imagined. The idea was scrapped. It was not long after that this song came together.

https://img.discogs.com/xXspVK1x6CVftFwjJrUH2WcYT58=/fit-in/600x599/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-867778-1167337486.jpeg.jpg

https://img.discogs.com/UGuoAwAMpfBVTQk4wICfym2C3h4=/fit-in/333x652/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-4003888-1352013245-7967.jpeg.jpg

Unabashedly love this song. Pretty similar to "Allentown" in concept, like you said Dr. C, but both songs are also really good at matching the music with the setting. The vocal jump in each third line is a great touch too - those kind of vocal stretches have been lacking in the last couple albums. I can see people thinking the song is too serious and earnest, but it works for me. He plays it in concert a lot so I don't think I'm alone

I never knew the violinist was Ithzak Perlman! Also I just learned that the line is not "I've got bills to pay and children who need booze"

love it

My favorite Billy mode, lyrically speaking, and I love that it has such a huge sound

It sounds like squalls and ocean & i just really do unabashedly love it

I really like this song too. And if actual struggling fishermen hated it and found it inaccurate and/or patronizing, I don't want to know. In contrast with my attitude toward "Allentown."

love this song, Billy's great at embodying displaced workers, I bet The River is his fav Springsteen album. Billy's good at picking out little insider details, like stripers they can't fish anymore or chromium steel instead of just steel

lots of things I hear in this, obviously any nautical tragedy has to give The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald some props

right at the beginning there's a change that reminds me of the song "Brothers in Arms"by Dire Straits but overall the song that comes back to me is "The Highwayman" like where Billy reaches up for "there's no island left for an Is-land-ers like me" it reminds me of when Waylon's dambuilder says"they buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound"

this is a pretty good song! a tad ponderous but I can't fault him for wanting to show that he was taking this subject matter seriously. something about the swaddling off the production also takes the edge off his "grunty rock" delivery (which has been starting to become distracting for me over the last few records) and letting me just hear his voice and the melody. makes it seem oddly like something that could have, with a different arrangement, showed up on one of the 70s albums or at least nylon curtain. catchy, too.

not a fan of the drum sound though. curious if liberty's ever spoken about the way he was recorded over the years... this feels like he's consciously keeping it boneheadedly simple to reach the cheap seats in the stadium, but then in the land of click tracks (?) and digital isolation it just sounds boring and flat. maybe in 1989 it sounded exciting and fresh. it's not the most ridiculous "80s drum sound" record but it doesn't feel much like a drummer and singer-songwriter laying down basic tracks in the same room either.

I really like the run-together lines going into the chorus. This is actually pretty non-flashy clever lyric writing, because, if you'll notice, the verse-to-chorus transitions contain an internal rhyme:

Too proud to leave I worked my fingers to the bone / So I could own my Downeaster Alexa

I got people back on land who count on me / So if you see...

It's a bit like the double-duty syllable trick mentioned upthread - "you're the one that I depend upoooooonHonesty..." only it's less noticeable, and maybe a little more sophisticated.

Love this one so much too. Reminds me of a singer-songwriter from the early-to-mid 70s who used to write these character/plot-driven songs. Oh wat was his name. Had an album called "Streetside Lemonade" or something.

lots of things I hear in this, obviously any nautical tragedy has to give The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald some props

He's moved on from Sumner to Lightfoot!

I never knew the violinist was Ithzak Perlman!

Dumb trivia that you may have already found out: Due to legal issues, he's listed on the album only as "World Famous Incognito Violinist." Apparently, it was his only hit!

Does this song trigger those Amazon things? I don't know how they work anyway.

The only sour note for me is the YI YI YI YOOOOOs.

So, people actually like this one? I just hear it as part of a larger trend of Billy (and other boomer rockers) becoming immune to fun in the latter half of the 80s.

I get distracted by having a song about the hard rugged authentic elements told through such a synthetic "Back in the High Life" sound.

But epic!

Reminds me of "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" and "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key" and so on.

Quit trolling Atlantis, crypto.