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Billy Joel...The Worst Pop Singer Ever


KiwiCoromandel

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This may seem an odd moment to bring up the subject of Billy Joel. But the recent death of the painter Andrew Wyeth revived a long-standing debate over whether his art is respectable or merely sentimental schlock. (Say it: good or bad?) It got me to thinking about the question of value in art and whether there are any absolute standards for judging it. It indicates the question is still alive, not relegated to irrelevance by relativism.

And then I picked up The Art Instinct, a new book by Denis Dutton, the curator of the Arts & Letters Daily Web site. The book strives valiantly to find a basis for judging the value of art from the perspective of evolutionary psychology; in it, Dutton argues that a certain kind of artistic talent offered a competitive advantage in the Darwinian struggle for survival.

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?

read more here...

http://www.slate.com/id/2209526/

source:Ron Rosenbaum/The Spectator

image:Slate....The Piano Man....the worst Pop singer ever?

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When he first emerged on the pop scene, his music was smug, pretentious and nuanced. Later, though, I feel that he actually did some pretty good rock and roll stuff. I can't say that period lasted very long, not more than a few years, but it does exist. He's now back to the scotch on the rocks, velvet Elvis mode, albeit now from the classical side of the street.

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