Unemployment, War and Billy Joel

The Social Significance of Billy Joel 

Whether or not you like the music of Billy Joel, who has been around for a long, long time, you have to give him credit for making some recordings which, besides being good listening, dealt with problems facing the nation.  One of the CDs in my car’s disc player is Joel’s old Nylon Curtain album.  I find myself pushing the replay button quite often for two selections on that disc. Although I found the most listenable number on the album  to be Scandinavian Skies, a piece of fluff  probably written when Joel and his group were on a European tour, l really want to direct you to what I feel are two works of "social significance" which will be played for years to come.

First is the disc’s lead song, Allentown. This is about the disillusionment of young people growing up there after the mines and mills had shut down taking job opportunities with them.  No matter how well they did in school, there was little for them to do except join the service (“they threw an American flag in our face”) during the 60s at the height of the Vietnam War. I understand one of Joel’s accompanists was from Allentown and inspired the song.  Joel, of course, was from Long Island.

And the Vietnam War is the subject of the album’s other great song, Goodnight Saigon. It starts with the sound of a helicopter’s blades beating as the last Americans are evacuated from Saigon as our military effort there collapsed, and recounts Marine boot camp at Parris Island and the terrors of young men fatalistically fighting the Viet Cong (“And we will all go down together”). Some of those boys from Allentown, in the words of the song, “came back in baskets as numbered corpses.”  

We are still dealing with loss of jobs today and our troops are dying in Afghanistan instead of  Vietnam, but I haven’t heard any anthems sung about these things as Joel did so well forty-five years ago.  And if I am wrong, and rap and hip-hop artists are indeed addressing these issues, it’s too bad that I can’t understand the words they’re singing.  Do me a favor. Try to listen to Billy Joel singing these two songs, and hang in there for Scandinavian Skies as well.  (I’ll even lend you the CD, but you have to promise to give it back after you listen to it or make a copy.)
JL