Reginald Kenneth Dwight strikes back!

6 Comments

1. Also, he’s friends with Leon Russell, who is clearly a wizard.

2. [TLDR]
   Sometimes I hate my parents for instilling in me a love of Billy Joel. Why couldn’t they have instilled in me a love of Elton John? Everyone loves Elton John he wears Donald Duck costumes and writes songs about blonde bimbos that die too young! If only I was raised an Elton John fan I could have dated the Snow Week Queen and become a banker too. Just like in the movies! This feeling never lasts long. Billy Joel is not cool. I am not cool. We were meant to be.
   I get in John v Joel arguments more often than I’d like to admit. I try to find the humor in it (really both of their catalogs are full of shit) but I can’t. I can’t because no one ever gives Billy Joel a fair shake. He’s lame and Elton wrote that song about the midget pole dancer. Who doesn’t like midget pole dancers? I DON’T THAT’S WHO! Midgets are untrustworthy, grifters and pole dancing demeans women. Look my hearts going to blow up when I’m forty. Genetics, beer and pork have it in for me we all know it’s true. So please give consideration to this one, short argument.
   Billy Joel and Elton John have pretty much had parallel careers. The early 70s catalog of Elton John is pretty good. Billy Joel’s isn’t. Elton John quickly ran off the shitty piano pop cliff never to recover. About the time Elton was writing shit like Island Girl Billy Joel was writing a series of songs that were about as punk as you can get on the piano. These songs aren’t his big hits. They’re lesser hits, b-sides and cuts so deep from the album that most no one has heard them.
   Elton John can only write two types of songs saccharine pop ditties about fun times and schmaltz ballads that simplify the concept of love. Billy Joel’s songs are more complex. The Strangers is about the alienating feeling that the modern world makes us all feel. Anthony’s Song captures youthful rebellion like Crocodile Rock never could. Goodnight Saigon and Allentown shows he can capture the feelings of the everyman. And while Elton John peaked and then went off the deep end never to Billy Joel will occasionally remind everyone of his above averageness even in his shittiest pop days.
   [/TLDR]

   • LOL uptown girl

     • The lengths a man will go to put his dick in models knows no bounds.

3. To date, of the many things humans are willing to kill each other in vast numbers over, liking two musicians who do separate but similar things isn’t one of them. So go ahead, like them both for what they do.

   Competition between musicians makes music better for all of us. Competition between their fans does not.

   • Anything bad I say about Billy Joel is said for the express purpose of prompting a patented Adam Rolland Rage Rant (the only poetry I enjoy), and pretty much anything I authentically don’t like about Billy Joel is just because I don’t think the sound of those early albums holds up anymore. I mean, listen to Goodnight Saigon and tell me it doesn’t sound like he’s got the Muppets singing backup on the refrain.

     I like them both, but I’ve got the early imprinting problem that Rolland does.

     That said, I would put any live recording of Better Off Dead against pretty much any music with a piano in it from any time.