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Title: Highly Overrated Sap for the Boomers
Review: Let's be brutally honest for a moment. This music is very cheesy. More specifically, its melodramatic, sentimental, and irritatingly precious. Worse still are Joel's pretensions toward poetry and his tendency to lionize his own artistic talents. As easily as these melodies can lull the listener into a stupified ersatz bliss, they can just as easily dull the ear to much more challenging forms (eg jazz or classical). This is the worst kind of commodified, commercialized cheese, spewed forth not by some faceless record company (that would be forgivable) but by the singer/songwriter himself! Billy Joel succesfully did to rock and roll what twinkie did to foodstuffs, what the A-team did to theater and what Vanila Ice did to hip hop. If Billy Joel is languishing in some "Hell" of adult soft-rock contemporary music as the official review states, then its a self-imposed exile by one of that bleak wind-blown plane's arch demons himself.
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