For that matter, there were more black people on the stage than in the audience when I saw Hamilton. I’ve been to Billy Joel concerts from Shea Stadium to Frankfurt, and I can confirm that pretty much all of his ticket-buying fans are white. The answer seems obvious enough: Joel is immensely popular, with 33 hits to his credit, and is known to put on a raucous, fan-friendly spectacle.Īt MSG during a show, Chandler sniffs at how Joel’s fans are a 19,000-strong “racially homogenous” cohort who “all dance, terribly and euphorically, to ‘Uptown Girl.’” Chandler takes note of a mom who “tries to cajole her reluctant young son to twist with her to ‘Only the Good Die Young.’” Nearby “three 20-somethings on a ladies’ night out shoot a Boomerang of themselves swaying to ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’” and “a sexagenarian in business attire uses a lull . . . to crush some work emails on his BlackBerry Priv.” A recent, tiresome example of writing about music by way of mocking a musician’s fans - ad hominem at one remove - popped up in The Atlantic, where writer Adam Chandler spends a couple of thousand words being baffled about why Billy Joel continues to sell out MSG many times a year despite not having released a new album since 1993. Frustrated music writers tend instead to take lazy swings at other listeners, and Billy Joel’s fans are a big, soft, Dockers-wearing target.
Try as you may, you probably won’t be able to change someone’s mind about whether he likes a song. There isn’t a lot to argue about when it comes to music: Either you like it or you don’t.
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