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I understand Billy Joel now

submitted by 2plus2equals5 to whatever 2 weeksMay 16, 2024 10:11:42 ago (+5/-0)     (whatever)

Growing up in the 1980's, something about the song "Uptown Girl" always seemed to stick in the back of my mind.

Here is a guy putting his beautiful wife on the pedestal stage and then completely ridiculing everything about her in public. Wow. Shouldn't a husband be supportive of his wife's success? So why is he humiliating her. The lyrics "in her white breaded world" didn't seem to match reality. Here is a wealthy elite musician who's white as well. He sings about getting drunk in Italian restaurants and looks Italian. He definitely married up in the looks department so what kind of control did he have over her? Why would she agree to that?

They he talks about fucking Catholic school girls like whores which is antithetical and a bit insulting to their religion. Whatever. Young men are just horny and probably would concur. I didn't understand why Catholic girls were singled out.

Singing about Vietnam soldiers enjoying dying together was a bit odd. And "we were more wrong than right"? Kissinger talked funny and was running the entire US Government's war from behind the curtains. There were strong feelings on both sides back then but the dying part is not the point of war. Surviving is. There were a lot of depressed vets back then.

Then pretending to be just a poor pianist street musician like Simon and Garfunkel was not being truthful. Every ten minutes he's back on the MTV screen again.

Okay then so he was a die-hard poor liberal. But then he starts knocking destitute Pennsylvania coal miners. The unions were the only thing keeping wages and medical survivable for them to raise their families. They worked long days in miserable conditions. The corporations exploited the hell out of those White men living on subsistence wages, breathing poisonous air, and drinking poisonous water. It was an era of corporations gone wild under that Hollywood-actor POTUS, who's underlings smuggled cocaine while his wife talked to aliens.

We didn't start the fire? Who is "we" and what fire is he talking about?


16 comments block

Joel's father, Howard (born Helmut) Joel (1923–2011), a classical pianist[18][17] and businessman, was born in Nuremberg, Germany, to a Jewish family, the son of merchant and manufacturer Karl Amson Joel, and educated in Switzerland...Joel's mother, Rosalind (1922–2014), was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish parents, Philip and Rebecca Nyman, who emigrated from England.

- Courtesy of wikipedia

Every. Single. Time.