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. 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.

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