YMMV / Billy Joel

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Someone has suggested that the narrator of "Piano Man" is unknowingly playing at a gay bar, the patrons have a betting pool running on when he'll figure it out, and that John keeps getting him free drinks because he has a crush on him.
• Anvilicious: "Second Wind", both the song and the video, are pretty obvious and perhaps cheesy about teen suicide.
• Condemned by History: "We Didn't Start the Fire" has gotten this reputation by 2023 after Fall Out Boy's cover of the song that same year brought attention back to it, with modern-day critics panning the original song's repetitive melody and inane lyrics.
• Critical Dissonance: He's had a hit-or-miss reputation with critics, but is still a major star.
• Covered Up:
  • "Shameless" and "To Make You Feel My Love" are both more famous through their covers by Garth Brooks. The latter was also covered by Adele.
  • "To Make You Feel My Love" wasn't even a Joel original- it was written and first performed by Bob Dylan...meaning that Joel was on both ends of this trope with the same song.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Reflecting their real-life friendship, Billy Joel's fans tend to be fans of Elton John since both of them are pop/rock pianists who became popular around the same time and are staples of oldies radio.
  • As two of the biggest artists hailing from the New York Metropolitan region, Billy Joel fans and Bruce Springsteen fans often overlap. The two are also friends and have performed onstage with each other a number of times.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: His 1987 tour of the USSR was a huge deal, as it helped symbolize the opening of the Soviet Union to the rest of the world. To this day, many Russian groups are strongly influenced by him.
• Growing the Beard: His 1973 album, Piano Man, containing such classics as "Captain Jack", "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" and of course "Piano Man".
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • "Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway)" is about the violent destruction of New York, written to mock the doomsaying [re: the skyrocketing crime rate and plummeting property values] of the time of its writing. Joel sang the song at a number of 9/11 tribute concerts to defy the trope. His performance of it at the Concert For New York City, held less than a month after 9/11, actually turned it into a Heartwarming Moment,^note "I wrote that song 25 years ago, I thought it was gonna be a science fiction song... I never thought it would actually happen. But unlike the end of that song, we ain't going nowhere!" and he sang it again at an NBC benefit concert telethon for victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In the latter he even changed one line of lyrics to reference the serious damage sustained by Staten Island in the storm.
  • In "Zanzibar", Joel sings that Pete Rose "is such a credit to the game". He's been banned from baseball for gambling on his own team. In fact whenever Billy sings the song live now, he changes the lyrics to "Rose will know he'll never get into the hall of fame"
• Ho Yay:
  • Billy observes that there is a lot of it in the shower scenes in his "Allentown" video, something he didn't notice at the time.
  • The song "James" also has a touch of it.
    James,
    Do you like your life?
    Can you find release?
• Magnificent Bastard: "The Ballad of Billy the Kid": Billy the Kid himself is a boy who moves to Colorado from West Virginia. He decides to take up bank robbery, taking the teller by surprise with his youth. This begins a series of increasingly daring robberies and gunfights that grant him legendary status amomgst cowboys, including the very townspeople he robbed. After sacking banks from Utah to Oklahoma, Billy is captured and accepts his hanging with dignity, his death witnessed by lawmen and outlaws from across the West.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "We Didn't Start The Fire" tends to be parodied quite a bit on the internet.
  • There are tons of YouTube videos of pianists doing their rendition of the "Prelude" to "Angry Young Man".
  • "Piano Man" has the exact same meter as the H. P. Lovecraft poem "Nemesis," with a similar effect as Emily Dickinson and the Gilligan's Island theme.
  • Billy Joel vs. Spamton ^ExplanationFollowing the release of Chapter 2 of Deltarune, fans quickly picked up on the phrase "BIG SHOT" due to it being both the catchphrase of Spamton, a highly popular character in the game, and the title of the song that plays during the Spamton NEO fight. In the wake of that, music fans dug up the Billy Joel track of the same name and began jokingly tying him with Spamton, be it through depicting each figure as the other or getting in mock arguments about which one of the two is better. This guy even mashed the two tracks together!
• Narm Charm:
  • The video for "You're Only Human (Second Wind)" is corny beyond all belief, but doesn't detract from the song's message about suicide.
  • "We Didn't Start the Fire" is Narmy for its ridiculous premise of singing a list of major events in modern history to a repetitive and simplistic melody, but that's half of what makes it so enjoyable.
• Nightmare Fuel: The video for "Pressure". The cover of the Piano Man album is a bit freaky as well, with its corpse-like face.
  • A much more subtle example, but the song "Through the Long Night". Something just sounds off about it.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • "Movin' Out" is a mostly harmless song, but the sound effects of screeching tires can be heard in the middle of the song... which is not exactly a kind thing for drivers to hear on the radio.
  • Discussed in "Pressure".
• Refrain from Assuming:
  • It's "River of Dreams" not "In The Middle Of The Night".
  • Similarly, it's "Summer, Highland Falls" not "Sadness or Euphoria".
  • "Goodnight Saigon" is not called "We Will All Go Down Together".
• Retroactive Recognition: The boy wearing glasses that nearly drowns while swimming in the video for "You're Only Human" is none other than a young Adam Savage, during a time when he was attempting an acting career before going into model/special effects work.
• Signature Song: "Piano Man" and "Uptown Girl" would be the main contenders, but "We Didn't Start the Fire", "Just the Way You Are", "My Life", "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" and "She's Always a Woman" definitely count as well, as well as "Vienna", which has pretty much become his quintessential album track. Going by album:
  • Cold Spring Harbor: "She's Got a Way" (also counts for the Songs in the Attic live album, which helped popularizing the song). "Everybody Loves You Now" is also fairly popular".
  • Piano Man: the Title Track, of course. Another very appreciated track is "Captain Jack", and also "You're My Home" is well-liked.
  • Streetlife Serenader: "The Entertainer".
  • Turnstiles: "New York State of Mind". "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" though is the only single released.
  • The Stranger: "She's Always a Woman", "Just the Way You Are", "Only the Good Die Young" and "Movin' Out" are the hit singles and are still very popular; however, "Vienna" and "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" count as well. While they never were released as singles, the former has become ridiculously popular in later years on streaming services, especially among younger people, and is a firm fan favorite and one of Joel's favorite songs overall; the latter is well-known for being Joel's longest composition, is widely regarded as one of Joel's best songs - and, indeed, it is his personal favorite song.
  • 52nd Street: "My Life". "Honesty" and "Big Shot" are also well-known, though.
  • Glass Houses: "It's Still Rock & Roll to Me", followed by "You May Be Right". Well-known is also "Don't Ask Me Why".
  • The Nylon Curtain: "Allentown", "Pressure" and "Goodnight Saigon".
  • An Innocent Man: several songs on it are very well-known, but "Uptown Girl" is Joel's best known song besides "Piano Man", very probably. "The Longest Time" is also very popular, and the Title Track and "Tell Her About It" were huge hits and are still well-known - though, the latter is sort of a Creator Backlash, and was almost immediately dropped from concerts after a few times it was played next to its release.
  • The Bridge: "A Matter of Trust".
  • Storm Front: has many well-known songs, but "We Didn't Start the Fire" stands out. "The Downeaster 'Alexa'" is also very appreciated ans well-known, while "I Go to Extremes" was a hit at the time, but lost a bit of popularity. Another well-known track which Billy is very fond of is "And so It Goes".
  • The River of Dreams: the Title Track. "Lullabye" is also popular.
• Squick: The "instant pleasuredome" line in "You're My Home".
• Tear Jerker: If you live in New York—or really anywhere in the New York metro area—then "Miami 2017 (I've Seen the Lights Go Out On Broadway)" can definitely be this. The same can be said about "New York State Of Mind".
• Unintentional Period Piece
  • "Big Shot" sings about attending hot spots like Elaine's (it closed in 2011) and wearing Halston original dresses (Halston died in 1990).
  • “Allentown” is a melancholy song about the economic decline of the eponymous Pennsylvania city, brought on by the collapse of Bethlehem Steel Corporation and other blue-collar industries in the area. By the end of the '00s, however, the city's fortunes had changed dramatically, as increasingly-unaffordable rents in New York City made it a comparatively-cheap “bedroom community” for white-collar commuters, coupled with an influx of Latino immigrants that reversed its shrinking population trends.
  • "Sleeping With The Television On" makes reference to the time when TV broadcasts ended and began at certain hours, as opposed to now, when most broadcasts run 24/7, making the line about waking up to the white noise irrelevant.
  • "We Didn't Start the Fire" mentions Tiananmen Square but not the collapse of the Berlin Wall, placing it squarely at a specific point in 1989.
  • While the New York Metro area was hit with plenty of devastation in the 40+ years after it's release (most notably 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy), it obviously didn't go through any sort of dystopian horror in 2017, as described in "Miami 2017."
• Values Resonance: "Allentown" tells about the harshness of the post-Baby Boomer generations and how touched they all are by poverty, environment-induced depression, limited employment opportunities due to a struggling economy and other general hardships they face. As gut-wrenching it is to still stomach and endure, the lyrics also give way to a sense of empathy and (albeit distant) hope for a better future.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Billy is seen as a family-friendly singer due to goofy novelty songs like "We Didn't Start the Fire" and "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me", along with his reputation for singing AC-friendly ballads, however a lot of his material, especially in his earlier albums, is not that family-friendly (the line "But don't come bitchin' to me" in "Big Shot" would have earned 52nd Street a Parental Advisory sticker had it been released in modern times).

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