169. Billy Joel, "The Stranger"

 

A collection of show tunes in search of a midrange musical, this album was perfect for the 70's, in that it is completely nonthreatening and unchallenging while also being good enough to still get played on  the radio every day.  (In fact, there is a Billy Joel musical, called "Movin' Out," after the first track on this album, and it sounds horrifying: "all the vocals are performed by a pianist (the "Piano Man", representing Billy Joel) and band suspended on a platform above the stage while the dancers act out the songs' lyrics, basically making the show a rock ballet.")

This might be your Mom's favorite album.

All of which leads to this inescapable conclusion: Billy Joel is not, and will never be, cool.  There are countless essays (ok, maybe two that I know of) about this fact and Joel's grinding resentment about this, despite the fact that he's richer than God and has married a series of increasingly younger beautiful women and lives in a palatial estate on Long Island and has some of the best-selling albums of all time.  You get the feeling that he'd trade it all for one-tenth of the cachet of the Ramones or the Clash.  

Look, I can't help it if "Just the Way You Are" is an ultra-cheesy song with porn sax and tinkling keys that makes dentist office waiting room music sound like Rammstein; people eat that shit up, and it's got an incredibly hooky melody and whatnot.  "Only the Good Die Young" has the famous meditation on religious young women, "Catholic girls start much too late," which confused me as a child because Catholic girls had exactly the opposite reputation, from what I heard.  (Look, it was a different time.)  The album's centerpiece, the more than 7-minute "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," (you know, "a bottle of red/a bottle of white") has movements and scene changes and seems pretty much written to be in a musical.  

The title track is what today seems like an unremarkable observation that we all have a secret side to ourselves that we rarely reveal in public, but probably seemed super-deep at a time when pop songs didn't delve into material much deeper than "She left me" and "She came back, so hot."  

Look, the songs are fine and Billy Joel is fine.  It's just a little too E-Z listening for me, even at my advanced age when I should be getting into easy listening.  

This is not the album with "Piano Man" on it, btw.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Just on sales and airplay alone I guess.