BILLY JOEL – "Uptown Girl"

OHhhh Ohhh ohh OHHH ohhh ohh wah, oh oh oh OH ohhh ohhhh woah!

I know you’re right and this is a 6 kind of a record, but I have such a residual affection for it that I’m bumping it up to 7. It really dos feel like a musical out-take, and I love musicals with all my heart, so there we are.

This is 100% a Four Seasons tribute, or am I rather misreading your comments? The “fi-yi-yine” is a direct lift from Big Girls Don’t Cry-yi-yi; the story is (deliberately, I’d guess) the inverse of Rag Doll. As a man in a permanent New York state of mind, I’d guess BJ had little time for the car crazy clean cut California quintet and was a Frankie Valli man to the core. Besides, the Four Seasons and Beach Boys were both adept at laddish bonhomie as well as pining for Ronnie, Wendy, Rhonda or Sherry*.

It’s better than a sexless update of Grease, as there were contemporary cinematic connections – the John Hughes movies, from memory, are all about class, crossing the tracks, trying to pull someone who should be beyond your reach. So Billy, for once, was kind of a step ahead of the pop pack**.

Got my goat at the time as no one seemed to give two hoots as to Uptown Girl’s sources – I don’t remember a solitary mention of the Four Seasons when this got airplay. As with Undercover’s Fisher Price version of Baker Street, though, it took a future Popular entry of staggering vacuousness for me to finally appreciate the craft of the original.

A quick nod to The Longest Time, something like the 5th single from An Innocent Man, which is a rather sweet a cappella doo wop pastiche.

*A year after Uptown Girl, the Beach Boys and Four Seasons teamed up for a 45 called East Meets West. Cascading harmonies on the intro, then widdly guitar solo, much shouting of “east” and “west” by overage cheerleaders… it ends up something like a tv theme for a programme on restart jobs for the over 50s.

**It’s Still Rock’n’Roll To Me from 1980 contains an embarrassing lyric of bullish squareness and refusal to follow fashion on a par with Bruce Foxton’s hysterical Carnaby Street: “Why should we accept the change and buy clothes of today?” Too right, thought BJ.

You know, I can’t ever remember this song NOT being around (probably because I would’ve been about 18 months old when it came out), and for some reason – reasons I can’t quite explain – it brings a great big smile to my face. Joyous stuff.

Eight, possibly even a nine, for me.

For what it’s worth, I would give this an 9. It’s obviously done with a lot of love and, also, in 1983, it took some doing to totally shut out any 1980s production mores from a Four Seasons pastiche. There’s a lovely richness to the harmonies, an internal tension (bordering on dissonance) that you also hear in Abba songs sometimes (maybe it’s the classical training). On some of the harmonies, you even get an even richer counter-harmony going on that’s no less beautiful. I always listened to the record that this came from as a concept album about an ugly bloke who found himself dating a model and couldn’t believe his luck. There’s a definite “can’t believe my luck” quality to almost every song on the record. As an ugly teenager, this was something I could really aspire to!

Anyway, this from the man himself: “It was sort of a novelty song. That whole album was like a homage to music of the time when I was a teenager in the pre-Beatles 60s. It was supposed to be Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Frankie Valli sings as though someone’s squeezing him in the corleones and that’s what it’s supposed to sound like. You’re on the edge and you’re in pain.”

“The song started out as Uptown Girls. I had just recently gotten divorced. So here I was, a rock star who was suddenly single. I took a vacation down in the Caribbean. I met Elle McPherson, Christie Brinkley and Whitney Houston all at the same moment in some little hotel bar. Whitney Houston wasn’t known. She was only 16 or 17 – she was a model. They were all down on the model shoot and I was just in the piano bar playing As Time Goes By.”

“I looked up and there were these three gorgeous women looking at me from the other side of the piano. I looked back down at the piano and said, ‘Thank you! Being a singer is so great! What an incredible thing this is!’ I was squiring these models around! I dated Elle McPherson half a year before Christie. Then I was dating Christie Brinkley, and so the original song was Uptown Girls, I was just a pig in shit. It was like To All The Girls I’d Never Loved Before But Always Wanted To. I started writing the song and then I got together with Christie, so then I said, well perhaps I’d better drop the ‘s’ on Uptown Girls.” I’ve been pretty lucky. It’s all because of the piano”? Hell yeah! Why do you think guys go out and get sports cars?”

(That’s a 0, by the way)

#2 Watch: Two weeks of Paul McCartney & Michael Jackson’s ‘Say Say Say’ (rather more exciting than ‘The Girl Is Mine’) and then three weeks of Paul Young’s ‘Love of the Common People’, a single which pulls of the rare trick of being simultaneously ludicrous and dreary.

From my 15-year-old perspective, this was smug, self-satisfied, and entirely irrelevant to today (i.e. 1983): never mind that we were bathed in original 1960s close harmonies every time we switched on AM radio, now our new number ones had to have them too? Along with “Can’t Hurry Love” and “True”, this was a sign that pop was being hijacked by middle-aged nostalgia, and there’s nothing less relevant to a teenager.

From my 41-year-old perspective… pretty much all of that, still. Joel was born in 1949, so he was a young teenager when Frankie Valli was having hits, and he was 34 when this was released. It would be as if my peers had started releasing New Romantic tributes in 2002… oh, hang on, they did. And I did like Welcome to the Monkey House. But I didn’t expect the kids to like it. The kids were listening to their Pinks and Eminems and R. Kellys and stuff that mattered to them, not having to put up with number ones their mums and dads were buying. More power to them, and less power to Mister Piano Man. 3.

That said, my feelings towards this may be as much a rejection of Billy Joel’s entire oeuvre as of this song in isolation.

The sole Billy Joel moment that I do like is ‘It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll To Me’ – a bewildered response to the popularity and perceived newness of Graham Parker and Elvis Costello that has a commendable sense of emotional honesty to it. I prefer the Laptop version, though.

And I would grudgingly conceed that ‘Just The Way You Are’ is a very good song – but I’ve never heard anyone perform it without sounding a bit smarmy.

Uptown Wally
She’s been living in a Tesco trolley
She’s been going out with Action Man
They’ve been kissing in the A-team van.

Childish but I coudn’t resist.

Billy # 15 – “And I would grudgingly conceed that ‘Just The Way You Are’ is a very good song – but I’ve never heard anyone perform it without sounding a bit smarmy.”

Absolutely, undoubtedly the worst case being the version by Barry White. What with his comedy struggling-not-to-have-a-heart-attack vocal and a completely ludicrous arrangement, the luurvve walrus really did a Three Mile Island job on it. Fucking ridiculous.

look at me I’m an ugly bloke with a supermodel: AND YOU CAN BE TOO!
versus
look at me I’m an ugly bloke with a supermodel: AND YOU’RE NOT!
versus
look at me I’m an UGLY SUPERMODEL!

=

likeable billy
vs
dislikeable billy
vs
the anti-billy

i think all of these are present in this song (and his work), which somewhat (to me) explains the extremism of the antipathy — he combines stuff we prefer to think of as distinct

My mum was a huge fan for some time, so I’d heard him a lot at home and was kind of down on him in general cos of it, but this being #1 could have turned me. I did briefly really try to like joel, i even recall i had a tape when i went down to college (yes i was that cool kid). I came back out of it liking a fair few of his songs (all the really well known ones) and really hating quite a lot more. The vietnam song in particular is painful.

Only recently did my mum tell me that she can’t stand this song. I DON’T REMEMBER IT THAT WAY YOU INDIE FAKER OH NO HE’S SOLD OUT ROCKIST.

that told her.

I’ve never been able to lsten to this record – hated it at the time, and my feelings haven’t softened over the years. This has a peculiarly depressing quality, a plastic sounding production and a relentlessly karaoke air that makes it possibly one of my least favourite number 1 singles ever.

‘My Life’ is pretty good though.

I’ll never forget the one-line review of “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me” in the NME (Julie Burchill I think): “Here Billy Joel reveals the extent of his problem”

I really don’t know about this one, it’s an enjoyable enough number but Joel is too ordinary and bloke-ish to bring off the leather-jacketed flash The Four Seasons had on their early records. It feels more like karaoke than anything.

This is one of the few big cheesy hits which I don’t enjoy singing stupidly along with. I don’t buy that it’s simply overplayed — there are plenty of songs that are played just as much that I will gladly lend my unison background vocals to every time.

Anyway, this is probably my least favorite song on Innocent Man which is otherwise pretty fabulous.

A narrow escape, Erithian, from having this song playing at you on a loop FOR ETERNITY.

Very happy that you made it through that Erithian because you summed up my feelings about Billy Joel in # 28.

Somehow these pre- Beatle, doo-wop ” nostalgia ” trips are part of a musical cycle here in North America. I don’t know if that type of music surfaces as often in th UK other than hen nights & kareoke….. I mean right now the musical ” Jersey Boys” ( based on the Four Seasons rise to glory ) is the hottest ticket in Toronto and still hot on Broadway.

Sukrat is right to point out the contradictions in Billy Joel’s act – which may explain the reason I struggle to warm to him. I have a similar reaction to a lot of Neil Diamond’s work – in both cases there are the slick Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building type hooks but on the other hand there are the laboured singer-songwriter lyrics. At least Uptown Girl lacks the latter but it always sounds a bit too pleased with itself to really engage me. I give it 5.

Unsurprised that this is so polarizing, but “Uptown Girl” is a personal favorite. Weirdly enough, I can’t listen to the Four Seasons, and for what it’s worth I despise “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” which would probably rank around #4 on the list of my least favorite songs of all time. It’s a joy of a song.

#37 What would #s 1-3 be on your list of least favourite songs of all time?

I’m not sure I could name mine – I’ll need to think about it.

This was one of the first pop songs I knew about during the time it was a hit, along with “Billie Jean,” “Bad,” and not much else. You probably have to go up to MC Hammer before it becomes a regular thing. It may have been my introduction to the concept of class differences; I’m pretty sure I remember asking my dad what “uptown” meant.

Trying to verbalize what I feel about it is surprisingly hard. I guess I neither hate it nor love it, although I can easily imagine doing either, and have probably done both (and will do again). I don’t relate to anyone’s comments above whether pro or con.

Somehow it feels more like a piece of alien music than like anything I could be expected to have an opinion about, and my knee-jerk response is mostly curiosity that it exists at all.

Re 38: “Billy Joel’s natural mode is irate” is right, and the reason why I like odd songs of his, but could never love him. He’s too silly. He fucks up the charm of Just The Way You Are with that “I don’t want clever conversation” line (‘thanks a lot!’ thinks Whitney/Christy/Elle); Movin’ Out has that great/daft “heart attack-ack-ack” line (which I remember hearing in a NYC slice-o-pizza place with thevisitor and he said ‘this is exactly how I always imagined New York would be’); My Life, in spite of a very pretty McCartney-esque melody is fantastically belligerent (“Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone!”).

A very New York friend of mine, old enough to be a first-hand Four Seasons fan, had a real downer on Joel. He could pick any line from We Didn’t Start The Fire and start cussing like Larry David: “‘Belgians in the Congo?’ BELGIANS in the fucking CONGO? The whole problem was that the Belgians had left the Congo, you fucking idiot!!”

Another I bought, but I’m starting to realise I bought most of the chart in 1983 like some sort of junior Tim Rice. I also grabbed ‘Say Say Say’ and ‘Love Of The Common People’, and find no need to play any of them anymore. Remembering ‘Uptown Girl’ without hearing it again, it sounds crisp and fun and 6 is about right.

That’s not the UK sleeve though. Not necessarily wishing to tout my more slapdash blog, you’ll see the sleeve just north-east of centre with its red note, dansette and disc scrawl masquerading as artwork.

It certainly was, Pink (#44), but that was earlier in the century – in the chronology of WDSTF, the Congo episode referred to is the early 60s, Lumumba etc, when they’d left and it was still a mess. Mind you if we’re going to start dissecting that song we’ll be here for the rest of the month. Anybody want to defend it? – I agree with thevisitor above, I have to say.

“A very New York friend of mine” – there’s a Billy Joel song title in the making, Wichita.

#47 yes, probably best not to look at wdstf too closely – mind you any attempt to descibe 50 years of world history in one four minute song risks losing a couple of nuances along the way. though i quite like ‘british politician sex’ as a three noun telling of the profumo affair.