I didn’t really understand what contempt was until it was explained to me in this piece on Slate. Now that I understand it, I have contempt only for Ron Rosenbaum.
Which brings me to Billy Joel—the Andrew Wyeth of contemporary pop music—and the continuing irritation I feel whenever I hear his tunes, whether in the original or in the multitude of elevator-Muzak versions. It is a kind of mystery: Why does his music make my skin crawl in a way that other bad music doesn’t? Why is it that so many of us feel it is possible to say Billy Joel is—well—just bad, a blight upon pop music, a plague upon the airwaves more contagious than West Nile virus, a dire threat to the peacefulness of any given elevator ride, not rock ‘n’ roll but schlock ‘n’ roll?
Back in the day, I was a Billy Joel fan. Today, not so much. Although “Zanzibar” has a pretty good lyric. Freddie Hubbard has a great trumpet solo on it.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, criticize.