I’ve written in this space before about my affection for Billy Joel. I think he has catchy tunes. But in the interest of fairness, it must be said: some people think that Billy Joel is an agent of Lucifer, his baritone a cancer metastasizing across radios worldwide to poison all that is gay and true in popular song. Liel Leibovitz is in the latter camp, and that’s her right. Joel, she says, “is so nefarious precisely because [he] was given great gifts—his songs, as Bruce Springsteen correctly noted, are masterworks of musical construction—and yet chose to squander them in the service of nothing but his own lust, vanity, and insecurity. You can tell just by looking at him: While Dylan’s face is still a mask protecting him from having to deal with emotions, and Young’s face is a topographical map of misfortune, Billy Joel, bald and glistening, looks like a big, smooth stone, as if the years and the sorrows, like so much water, simply polished its surface but failed to penetrate its core.”
This and more in today’s culture roundup.