Question about lyric in Billy Joel's "Allentown"

[jayjay]

@Ludovic

btw don’t listen to Piano Man either, then

:smack:

Yeah, okay…strike my last post. I guess none of the others have ever been brought to my attention like this one before.

[johnspartan]

@Little_Nemo

You kids might be surprised to hear this

Hey you dern kids get off my lawn! Shakes Fist

[Jeff_Lichtman]

My take on it is that many jobs were lost due to policies that were portrayed as patriotic, so if you complained about it you were accused of being unAmerican.

[Kent_Clark]

@jayjay

Annie, I can’t see that interpretation, given the bitterness and pessimism of the rest of the song.

Joel’s a Boomer, and the video seems to contrast the WWII soldiers returning to town with another soldier in a wheelchair returning at a later time. The song is off The Nylon Curtain from 1982, so only 7 years after the end of Vietnam. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that that’s basically what he’s referencing there, the difference in the treatment that the returning WWII soldiers received and the treatment that returning Vietnam soldiers received (not talking about “spitting” or anything, but the lack of victory parades and GI bills and conspicuous gratitude, etc).

Agreed. Put Goodnight Saigon and Allentown together. Our fathers went to war, came home, got a job in the mills and lived the American Dream. We went to war, came home, got a job in the mills and we’re getting screwed.

[DooWahDiddy]

@jayjay

He really had to manhandle the meter to make the flag line scan. I can’t remember the last time I heard a triplet in a narrative pop song.

Those aren’t triplets, just straight 8th notes. It just sounds like triplets because the em-PHA-sis is on the wrong syl-LA-ble. In other words: “They threw an A-mer-I-can flag in our face” instead of "A-MER-i-can, like we would normally say it.

[msmith537]

@MsRobyn

The song is about the death of the American steel industry in Eastern Pennsylvania in the late 1970s and early 80s; it was released on 1982’s The Nylon Curtain album. It’s told from the perspective of an unemployed mill worker.

In your typical one-industry town (like Allentown), kids would go from high school to work in the mill, where they had the opportunity to be promoted without much formal education. (“Every child had a pretty good shot/To get at least as far as their old man got”) With the closing of the mills, however, those opportunities went away, to be replaced by massive unemployment.

The song is surprisingly anti-union. (“And the union people crawled away”) I’ve always taken the “But something happened on the way to that place/They threw an American flag in our face” lines as an insult to the men who were facing poverty and economic uncertainty, perhaps by the union and the mill owners; patriotism doesn’t mean a whole lot when you live in a depressed area with no good prospects. I don’t think it has anything to do with Vietnam because that’s not what the song is about.

I would say that’s more or less accurate. Allentown, PA is in the Lehigh Valley (AKE Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton metropolitan area or ABE). For decades, Bethlehem Steel (located in Bethlehem, PA) was a major employer in the region. Not just working class jobs, but management and engineering jobs as well. When the steel industry declined, many of those jobs disappeared. I went to school around there in the 90s and those towns were pretty depressing. Since then, the economy of the region seems to have picked up a bit.

Although It’s hard not to see the overt symbolism of the old Bethlehem Steel plant being converted into a Sands casino / resort.
But yes, the American flag in our face line would be a reference to the younger generation’s cynicism and resentment at not having the same opportunities as their parents.

[AWB]

From Songmeanings.net

This is an easy song to explain. This song is a story about the ordinary folk of Allentown, Pennsylvania and the Lehigh Valley (Bethlehem is next to or near Allentown) and the steel mills many of them worked at. The Lehigh Valley’s economy was based upon the steel mills that were there, and when they closed lots of people became unemployed.

The first verse talks about how people of Billy Joel’s parents’ age typically grew up in the Lehigh Valley. “Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time / Filling out forms / Standing in line” describes the mass of people applying for unemployment benefits after the layoffs. The typical man who lives around there who are Billy Joel’s parents’ age, the men of the Great Generation, participated in World War 2, may have met their future wife through the USO (an organization who entertains the troops when they’re on duty), then were employed by the steel mills of the Valley after the war.

The second verse talks about the assumption that good times would continue for ordinary folk and later generations of Allentown. Teachers would encourage kids to get degrees and even those who didn’t get one could rely on the steel mill economy to provide for their needs, or so people assumed. But after the closings, with the layoff of union employees and the unavailability of coal in the area, young people couldn’t rely on that anymore.

The last lines of the song say that those of the Great Generation could take for granted all this economic opportunity, but younger people could not. And when the young people were drafted into the Vietnam War (“Threw an American Flag in Our Face”), it wasn’t the same as with their parent’s generation. Not only was the war unpopular, but many young people felt dispirited already because of the unemployment and the events of the 1960s, so for them it was an insult not an opportunity.
The following lines describe just how the situation in the Lehigh Valley can destroy the spirit of even the best people living there:

“Well I’m living here in Allentown / And it’s hard to keep a good man down / But I won’t be getting up today”

He doesn’t feel he has a good reason to get up in the morning. What’s actually really ingenious about this song is just how Billy Joel can take something as ordinary, unhappy and newspaperish as unemployment in a mill city metro area and turn it into a story and flowing song which many people can relate to. Billy Joel is a great songwriter and storyteller.

[Little_Nemo]

@johnspartan

Hey you dern kids get off my lawn! Shakes Fist

Reagan’s become the equivalent of Kennedy or Truman - a historical icon rather than a politician. People forget that they were all controversial figures during their administrations with plenty of opposition.

It’s even worse when you’re reading about somebody like Washington or Lincoln and you see their contemporaries (and I’m talking about political colleagues not bitter enemies) calling them things like idiot or baboon. And you’re shocked - don’t they realize who they’re talking about? But of course to their contemporaries, Washington and Lincoln were ordinary politicians not legendary figures.

[drpepper]

Back in the olden days when MTV played music videos, I remember seeing this one during its heydey of heavy rotation. I distinctly remember that the visual during that one line was of what was clearly intended to be a Vietnam vet… a downtrodden guy in a wheelchair or something. So I always took the line “they threw an American flag in our face” to mean: the wartime draft came and took the young men [of our town, or whatever] in droves.

[jayjay]

As a (secretly) gay 12-year-old, what I remembered most out of the video for the last 20 years was the naked steelworkers, actually.

[robardin]

@jayjay

As a (secretly) gay 12-year-old, what I remembered most out of the video for the last 20 years was the naked steelworkers, actually.

“We work hard; we play hard.”