The problem of cool in ‘Billy Joel: And So It Goes’

Linda Holmes

This is an excerpt of a larger essay by Linda Holmes about the new documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, on HBO Max. You can read that piece in its entirety here.

Stories about pop musicians often run into internecine battles over what is cool and what is not. When I was young, I didn't care whether liking Billy Joel was cool — most of what I liked (musicals, Harlequin romances, writing) wasn't cool. But I think I always knew he cared deeply and couldn't help it. Rock critics mostly hated him: As critic Steven Hyden explains in And So It Goes, even though everybody knew he could write a melody, he was nothing like the anti-establishment punk music they were championing at the time he got famous, and a lot of them took his position as a top-seller with Columbia Records as adequate evidence that he was the despised establishment, the enemy.

But to him, he was a kid who grew up poor with a single mom, the rare divorced family in his neighborhood, the rare Jewish family in his neighborhood. He got badly burned by his first record contract, he loved rock and roll, and he was never comfortable or accepted in the California scene where some people thought he belonged in the '70s, with guys like James Taylor and Jackson Browne. (In the documentary, musician and producer Danny Kortchmar notes that it was hard for Joel and his music to fit in out there, maybe because he was "too New York," a loaded phrase if ever there was one.) He made the kinds of music he really liked, writing about all the things he was interested in.

In Joel's mind, what did he ever do to deserve to be treated like he was soft? Or phony?

And the more it bothered him that critics hated him, the more they hated him, because nothing is less cool than being bothered that people don't think you're cool and actually complaining about it. If you weren't a grasping try-hard before, buddy, well, you are one now.

It got nasty: He would rip up reviews on stage, and in retrospect, some of those reviews seem overheated and a little disingenuous themselves. (On screen, we see a pan of the retro-flavored An Innocent Man record that questioned how this guy dared to think he had the right to imitate the great Frankie Valli — and misspelled it as "Frankie Vallie.") There was a gaudiness to some of the thumbs-down takes, as if there were points to be earned by making them as devastating as possible. Artists are not the only ones who could stand to get over themselves now and then, after all, and critics are not immune from obsessing over their own standing.

Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney talk kindly about Joel and his music in And So It Goes, both helpfully identified in their chyrons as "MUSICIAN." So do Pink, Sting, Nas, Garth Brooks and Itzhak Perlman. I would like to believe that no part of Joel still looks at that and thinks, "See? They think I'm cool."

Misery loves ... music

Something that Hyden says late in the documentary struck me as particularly wise and probably relevant to my teenage self: that Billy Joel writes about "existential dissatisfaction." He writes songs about why nothing is happening, or why everything feels empty, or why something fell apart. Hyden also points out that a lot of these songs work at least as well coming from a guy who's 70 as they did from a guy who was 30. Maybe that's why Joel's career and his music have lasted so long, and why he was a hit at Madison Square Garden for a decade, up until the summer of last year. Being unfulfilled, as a topic, doesn't age as strangely as some pop themes might. Restlessness endures, as does love.

That restlessness also shows up in Joel's tendency to complain, which he acknowledges. It has blown up in his face a lot — with critics, yes, but his ex-wife Elizabeth Weber also says that writing "The Entertainer," which was a list of grievances against his record company, served only to alienate people who were trying to help him. It's a kind of ouroboros of self-sabotage, where the inability to ever be satisfied pushes satisfaction farther and farther away.

Maybe it's this sense of searching and never quite finding, of making mistakes that hurt yourself as much as anybody, that made this perfect teenager music for me. Maybe I should have been focused on rebellion, but I was too moody to muster the energy.