A few years ago, the Grinder was lucky enough to have drinks with Ron Rosenbaum, and were awed by the company. The man has published books on subjects as diverse as Hitler and Shakespeare, and left us stammering with his erudition. Finding out he was an NFL fan was especially cool. It's always a comfort to meet an intellectual who shares a passion for sports; a reassurance that not all fans are meatheads who get drunk, paint their bodies and spend Sunday picking fights in the stands. But now, sadly, our shimmering image of Rosenbaum is dashed; our once-shining dream crushed by the harsh glare of day. The man has dared to insult Billy Joel.Okay. Truth be told, we aren't the world's biggest Billy Joel fans. It's not like we ever took a road trip to see him play live or anything. But the Grinder still must defend Billy from Rosenbaum's invidious, and only moderately tongue-in-cheek assault, if only because "A Matter of Trust" once got us through a really bad breakup in college.
Rosenbaum's main gripe is that Joel's music reeks of "unearned contempt," a self-righteous disdain for others and the self-congratulation that goes with it. We don't hear it. Rosenbaum says Joel sounds condescending when he sings in Piano Man that "the regular crowd shuffles in." In New York State of Mind, he mocks the line about "movie stars and their limousines," pointing out that Joel has most likely ridden in limousines many, many times. Of course. Considering how Billy drives, it's the only responsible thing for him to do.
But Rosenbaum's most absurd gripe is that Billy Joel "takes up A&R advances" that would otherwise go to "genuinely talented artists, singers, and songwriters." This is unadulterated crap. If Billy Joel magically disappeared tomorrow, it is extremely unlikely that "genuinely talented" artists, singers, and songwriters, which is another way of saying artists Rosenbaum likes, would suddenly win massive record contracts and huge fame. Record companies would be much more likely to give all that A&R money to artists who sound like, for example, Billy Joel, if they could find any, because Billy Joel makes the record companies a tremendous amount of money. This is the sort of thing that falls under the catagory of "Duh."
What Rosenbaum misses is that music serves a vastly different function for him than it does, for, to be blunt, normal people. That is, people aren't arts critics, who don't make their living dissecting music. For Rosenbaum and other Joel-bashers, music is supposed to be emotionally complex, fraught, deep. But songs that are emotionally complex can, almost by definition, only appeal to a small segment of the population. ,That's because one person's "complexity" is another person's "weird." Songs with very broad, simple themes, like Joel writes, inevitably appeal to a broader crowd. They are designed to. Rosenbaum is like a food critic going to Fatburger and complaining that it isn't gourmet. Maybe not. But a lot of people sure do like it.
Finally, Rosenbaum has the audacity, the sheer temerity, to claim that Billy Joel's music is derivative, noting that "She's Always a Woman" is essentially a sideways version of Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman." Which, we can't deny, it totally is. But not bad enough that Dylan could sue.
The defense rests.
