both honorable and artistic. She's not a complete de adbeat. Joel, on the other hand, always comes off like a particularly obnoxious frat boy who's hoisted a few too many while trying to put the make on an airline stewardess. His profundity is singles-bar deep. As Danny Fields, Steve Forbert's and lggy Pop's manager, said long ago about a Pointer Sisters LP: "I thought we invented rock & roll to get away from crap like this." At any rate, since
Mad Love and
Glass Houses–MOR-pop-rock by superstars – will surely sell millions of copies, perhaps a new music-biz trophy is in order. Let's award Billy Joel a polyester record and hope he'll go away.
Two rock-critic friends of mine, both part-time Joel admirers, actually like Glass Houses "because there's nothing overtly stupid on it" (meaning there certainly was on 52nd Street, The Stranger, et al.). Some defense. Yet, in a way, I suppose they're right: unless you consider the entire album one bland and endless bad joke–as I do–there aren't any real howlers. Just fake this and fake that. Listen to Billy Joel take on the Rolling Stones, muffing a Mick Jagger inflection at the end of the third line in every verse of "You May Be Right," while the band dutifully cranks out what it considers raunch. Depressing, huh? Then there's fake Paul Simon ("Don't Ask Me Why"), fake Beatles circa their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band period ("All for Leyna," especially the choruses) and a godawful sort of Eagles-go-punk state of the union message called "Close to the Borderline," in which Joel reaches the heady conclusion that "Life is tough."
What's most annoying about Joel is his holier-than-thou sneakiness, his insistence to have it both ways. In "You May Be Right," the singer strikes one of the silliest tough-guy poses ever ("I've been stranded in the combat zone/I walked through Bedford Stuy alone/Even rode my motorcycle in the rain"), in general behaves like a perfect asshole, blames his girl for his actions when she points out that he's nuts, and then sums up everything with the logic of an egomaniac:
You may be right
I may be crazy
But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for ...
You may be wrong for all I know
But you may be right.
I guess what Joel's trying to do here is picture himself as a lovable loony, a teddy bear with a zip gun, but this brand of madness is snug enough–and smug enough–to make someone like Art Garfunkel look like Iggy Pop.
