For white culture writers, resorting to racial bean-counting is a doubly lazy gesture: It is the most minimally demanding way to showcase superior social enlightenment ( Hey, I’m not like these other white people, I like having people of color to provide my personal backdrop), and the allegedly regrettable nature of white-people preferences is the laziest possible, Comedy Cavern shorthand for “uncool.” For that matter, there were more black people on the stage than in the audience when I saw Hamilton. I’ve been to Billy Joel concerts from Shea Stadium to Frankfurt, and I can confirm that pretty much all of his ticket-buying fans are white. The answer seems obvious enough: Joel is immensely popular, with 33 hits to his credit, and is known to put on a raucous, fan-friendly spectacle.Īt MSG during a show, Chandler sniffs at how Joel’s fans are a 19,000-strong “racially homogenous” cohort who “all dance, terribly and euphorically, to ‘Uptown Girl.’” Chandler takes note of a mom who “tries to cajole her reluctant young son to twist with her to ‘Only the Good Die Young.’” Nearby “three 20-somethings on a ladies’ night out shoot a Boomerang of themselves swaying to ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’” and “a sexagenarian in business attire uses a lull . . . to crush some work emails on his BlackBerry Priv.”
![uptown girl billy joel year uptown girl billy joel year](https://www.vinylnet.co.uk/_assets/_user/images/prods/738907389004_1.jpg)
A recent, tiresome example of writing about music by way of mocking a musician’s fans - ad hominem at one remove - popped up in The Atlantic, where writer Adam Chandler spends a couple of thousand words being baffled about why Billy Joel continues to sell out MSG many times a year despite not having released a new album since 1993.
![uptown girl billy joel year uptown girl billy joel year](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/11/06/article-1327163-0BEF3904000005DC-291_308x185.jpg)
Frustrated music writers tend instead to take lazy swings at other listeners, and Billy Joel’s fans are a big, soft, Dockers-wearing target.
![uptown girl billy joel year uptown girl billy joel year](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/W_sD1PLJwh8/maxresdefault.jpg)
Try as you may, you probably won’t be able to change someone’s mind about whether he likes a song. There isn’t a lot to argue about when it comes to music: Either you like it or you don’t.