Joel's working-class Long Island ancestry led him to many of the same embattled themes that characterized punk: mistrust of romance, the media, nostalgia, and religion. He even deployed paranoid pronouns like the Clash: the heroic "I" acting in defiance of the conspiratorial "they." He was a sane punk placebo for the suburbs, self-possessed and anti-social without the Sex Pistols' call for annihilation. "I wanna destroy passersby," Johnny Rotten mewled, and while I shared this violent impulse, especially towards gym teachers, anarchy appealed much more to the C students than to my clique. Rotten's "No future" alarm didn't resonate with those of us who had high SAT scores.

 I graduated high school, then stumbled through a bourgeois maturation typical of the era: I went to college in a big northeastern city, I smoked pot (even though I never did learn to roll a good joint), and, eventually, I even got laid. I heard the Ramones, then Talking Heads, then Roxy Music. I went to rock clubs regularly; I took other, more complex drugs; and then I decided not to go to law school--all causality deliberately implied. To paraphrase the Velvet Underground, my life was saved by rock and roll.

 Now, I own the Aerosmith and the Lynyrd Skynyrd boxed sets, and I sing in White Courtesy Telephone, a weird New York rock band that sounds like a mix of Alice Cooper and Devo. Maybe by putting away my Billy Joel albums, I was trying to bury my strongest associations of having been a high-school loser. Maybe it's delayed Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe I can feel the excitement of slide guitars now that they don't signal imminent violence. Maybe hearing a Skynyrd song reminds me that, a-hahahahaha, the bullies with STP stickers on their notebooks are now changing oil filters for a living.

 I don't often listen to those 'seventies singer/songwriters anymore, but I did while writing this, for their evocative power. And now I recognize their covert appeal, beyond the peaceful melodies and clear singing: the meditative self-pity, the way they elevate mere disappointment and injury into tragic burdens, and their flirtations with misogyny--common notions among adolescent neurotics. I could have found similar comfort and sympathy elsewhere, whether in listening to the Sex Pistols or in reading The Catcher In the Rye. But when I looked at a Billy Joel album, I saw myself, either as fact, or as wish.



designed by jane