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His 1980 album Glass Houses, Joel’s melodic incursion into the punk-rock era (“You May Be Right,” “It’s Still Rock ‘N Roll to Me”) was in semi-constant rotation in my dad’s car. While I didn’t grow up in an orange juice household, like millions of Americans born in the 1980s, my required intake of concentrated saccharine did involve the music of Billy Joel. If you do it in California, Minute Maid wins every time.” The reasoning was simple: “That’s the taste you grew up with.” “If you do blind taste tests in New York,” he explained, “Tropicana will win every time. In 1998, in the era before big data, a brand researcher describing the effect of nostalgia on the palate brought up the orange juice test in an interview with The New York Times. Joel’s work, steadily dismissed as middlebrow and ersatz pastiche, hardly seemed destined for a decades-long afterlife. Springsteen, for example, has been awarded 20 non-honorary Grammys compared with Joel’s five. While Joel has scored twice as many Top 40 hits as his friend and fellow tri-state institution Bruce Springsteen, he’s received comparatively little of The Boss’s critical acclaim. These successes undoubtedly must irk his many critics, who have over the years derided Joel in extremely personal terms : as a would-be “ Irving Berlin of narcissistic alienation” (1973), “ the worst pop singer ever” (2009), and more recently, “ the great American nightmare” (2017). Another way of putting it: Despite having not released a new pop album since 1993, Billy Joel is outearning the likes of U2 and Adele. The MSG residency, with help from a methodical regimen of packed stadium shows across the United States and beyond, has turned Joel, who was all but retired just a few years ago, into the music industry’s fourth-highest paid performer in 20 (the most recent years for which data is available).
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But Joel’s dominance doesn’t end at the terminus of the Hudson River Line.
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After all, The Garden is fitted atop Penn Station-the busiest transportation hub in the entire Western Hemisphere-with subways and bus routes and seven different tunnels that fling Joel’s faithful base out to Hackensack on New Jersey Transit and Oyster Bay on the Long Island Railroad. The ‘Meta-emptiness’ of Emily in Paris Kevin Townsend, Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Spencer Kornhaber Since launching the residency in 2014, The Piano Man has sold out the Garden 40 times with performances already scheduled into July. A 19,000-strong congregation-carpenter jeans and Cartier watches, Yankee caps and yarmulkes, generationally diffuse and racially homogenous-all dance, terribly and euphorically, to “Uptown Girl.”įor more than two years now, Joel has held a “residency” at Madison Square Garden, performing monthly gigs that are slated to last, in Joel’s words, “as long as there is demand.” What drew me out to a recent MSG show is the staggering breadth of the current demand for Billy Joel.
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For those of you who are sick of wondering, this is what happens at a Billy Joel concert: A mother tries to cajole her reluctant young son to twist with her to “Only the Good Die Young.” A 45-year-old man in a Billy Joel-themed softball jersey, sitting third row and visible to all, hoists aloft a New Jersey vanity license plate that reads “Joel FN” and uses it to air-drum to “Pressure.” Three 20-somethings on a ladies’ night out shoot a Boomerang of themselves swaying to “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.” A sexagenarian in business attire uses a lull during Joel’s Perestroika-era ditty “Leningrad” to crush some work emails on his BlackBerry Priv.