I’ve never liked Pressure.
For Billy Joel fans, come here and tell me what your second favourite song is.
/shameless plug
Uptown Girl is bad. The Longest Time is awful.
Joe
And So It Goes
Our choir director loves this song - I think it is trite, pointless, meandering, boring.
I’ll be glad when it falls off the list.
Si
Yes, Uptown Girl has dated very, very badly.
No one’s yet mentioned his non-hit You’re Only Human (Second Wind) which might have been listenable if he hadn’t added a chorus of howler monkeys screeching “YOU’RE ONLY HUMAN! OOO OOO!” at regular intervals.
And I could certainly do without the visual of an old man making love to his tonic and gin. 
mmm
Indeed, one suspects that he doesn’t play it very often anymore…
A bit cute, given the passionate fans and the well-established alternative point of view. As someone who is not a big fan, I can say I enjoy his use of melody, chords and rhyme, but something about his songs just don’t work for me. Only the Good Die Young is a fun *carpe diem *song. Otherwise, not much grabs me.
But he is an excellent craftsman.
Ryan started the fire!
Double bleh.
Worth clicking the link just for the album cover.
There’s a bit of a “Peace Frog” vibe to the main riff, but but overall it’s just gaudaafaul.
There are two things about that song that I really like. First, I think the line “She never cared for me / but did she ever say a prayer for me” is pretty awesome. I like the near rhyme, and I think it’s a nice way of saying that the mother’s sense of Christian charity doesn’t extend to him.
The other thing that I love is that (at least I think) he is using the Elizabethan double meaning of “die”, meaning both “croak” and “orgasm.” Since he’s trying to convince Virginia that he “might as well be the one”, I think the “die” double entendre is probably deliberate. So, I applaud him for working a literate double entendre into a pop song.
Yeah but you can’t really fault him for that one, since everyone in that song is a real person. And according to Billy, he didn’t even change the names… John really was the bartender, and Davy really was in the Navy (and probably still is).
This.
Ironically, my high school senior class chose “This is the time” for our prom theme song. I suggested it. :smack:
There is absolutely no way in hell that is what he meant.
To answer the question posed as the thread title: Yes
The worst one (of his single releases, I should say) is the execrable An Innocent Man.
The way Joel sings about Davy, it’s like he thinks being in the Navy for life, getting health insurance, retirement, etc, is SO much worse than being a barroom pianist who gets his salary from a jar of spare change.
Um… okay. :rolleyes:
Though Billy Joel’s music is not my style, I don’t own anything by him, I don’t go out of my way to listen to him, and I don’t quite understand how he got retconned into the classic rock canon–still, I can’t quite agree with this. I can still recognize his talent as a songwriter. To me, he seems to fit in more with the early 70’s singer songwriters/soft rock era, which is why I don’t care for his style.
I don’t exactly hate the guy or anything. I may have even owned the Storm Front album at one point, but he’s always sounded like someone who should have been writing music for musicals for some reason. His songwriting just has that sort of feel to me.
However, I do think the guy’s got a decent knack for melody and can write a respectable hook. He’s a bit “cheesy” for my tastes, but I can’t deny that he’s good at what he does.
I have a confession to make. I actually did like Billy Joel when I was around 14 (this was around the time of The Stranger and Glass Houses albums). My only excuse for this is that I was young and relied too much upon the radio as my source of music. That being said, I do think Joel’s songs got infinitely more sappy around the time he hooked up with Christie Brinkley. He may have been happier (at least until she dumped him) but, IMHO, Bill Joel was a bit more listenable during the time he was going through a divorce and his ex-brother-in-law was embezzling from him.