Somehow the earnestness seems to bother critics. Each song, for better or for worse, seems to actually have a story behind it. But the songwriting craftmanship is still excellent and the lyrics actually seem to mean something (and I say that as someone who’s usually not a big lyrics person). It’s certainly true that much of his style derives from earlier periods and was in many ways out of step with the times (especially in the mid 80’s). I can understand that Billy Joel is not everyone’s cup of tea, but what I’ve never understood is why critics continually need to bash him to establish some sort of cred. Among those of us with deeper collections, BJ is one of the few artists whose unreleased album tracks are as well known and discussed as much as his biggest hit singles. Growing up outside Philadelphia in the 80’s I can say that virtually everyone I knew had at least one BJ album in their collection, the two (now three) part Greatest Hits album if nothing else. One thing that may not be evident to Brits is that BJ’s American fanbase is very much regionally skewed (far more than Springsteen’s for example), most specifically to the working-to-middle-class suburbs of the Boston-NY-Phila-DC northeast corridor. It’s good to see him getting a fair shake by many here as it’s pretty much a requirement to be a Serious Music Critic in America that Thou Must Hate Billy Joel, including writing at least one article about why the man and his fans represent everything that is wrong with popular music over the past 40 or whatever years…. Not entirely surprised to see this song and BJ in general be so polarizing in the comments. « CULTURE CLUB – “Karma Chameleon” THE FLYING PICKETS – “Only You” » Comments « 1 2 3 All Those endless runs of “oh-oh-whoas” are the main reason to listen to the song, and they’re a tip off as to where it’s really coming from, in spirit if not in music: not the street heat of Frankie Valli but the lusty lads-together innocence of the Beach Boys. It isn’t a record about bedding an uptown girl or wanting to bed an uptown girl, it’s a record about remembering wanting to bed an uptown girl, and boasting to your blue-collar buds that that’s what you were gonna do, and wanting to have blue-collar buds to boast to! The video makes this explicit with Christine Brinkley as pin-up come to life, but it’s in the song too, in the husky, hearty interplay of those cascading backing vox, whose prominence makes it obvious that the guys – not the girl – are the chief audience for Joel’s talk. Of course Billy Joel is smart enough to realise this, and “Uptown Girl” works because it’s history written by the winners. There’s nothing at stake in “Uptown Girl” – how could there be? Rock and roll moved uptown long ago. The street music – doo-wop and rock’n’roll – that “Uptown Girl” draws energy from was able to speak so powerfully to sexual and social codes partly because the act of addressing those codes head-on was itself a breach of them. She appeared in the video as well, proving toward the end that there are few things funnier than watching a supermodel try to dance.Billy Joel pays tribute to the music of his childhood, and so inevitably there’s something childish about “Uptown Girl”: its instant singability makes it sound like a Grease outtake, except there was more sex and chemistry in Grease’s flirtatious goofery. Perhaps the song's real-life inspiration, Joel's new relationship with then-wife Christie Brinkley, was behind its bubbly good vibes. It's a sheer delight from start to finish, one of the most musically successful songs not only on the album but of Joel's entire career he's clearly going for a genre piece here, but unlike some of the tracks on An Innocent Man that are a little studied in the way they re-create sounds from the past (first single "Tell Her About It," for example), there is nothing but giddy enjoyment to be found here. Most of An Innocent Man is fairly nonspecific in its homages to the sound of Billy Joel's musical adolescence, but "Uptown Girl" is full-on, 100 percent Four Seasons, from its soaring intro, with its perfect evocation of those classic New York City harmonies, to Joel's valiant attempt to get his gruff singing voice up into Frankie Valli's falsetto register on the fade.