and after 1986 what else could be new
Chuck Klosterman is right about Billy Joel - Joel is one of the most underrated singer-songwriters of his era. Klosterman is also wrong about Joel when he says that The Nylon Curtain was Joel's last great album. That was The Bridge.
After the artistic lull of An Innocent Man - yes, he is happy with Christie; yes, he grew up on doo-wop - Joel returned to form with The Bridge. It was a different Joel; no longer the angry young man, Joel made a mature, reflective pop album. Look at the lyrics to the wonderful ballad "This is the Time":
And so we embrace again behind the dunes
This beach is so cold on winter afternoons
But holding you close is like holding the summer sun
I'm warm from the memory of days to come.
Joel feels the chill on the beach as well as his own mortality but he embraces the moment as well as the moments of warmth to come.
The Bridge also features a great pairing with Billy and another piano man- the late Ray Charles as well as a duet with Cyndi Lauper.
Another interesting lyric on that album comes from Modern Woman:
Rock and roll just used to be for kicks/ And nowadays it's politics/ And after 1986, what else could be new
1986 began with the Challenger explosion, arguably the memorable events of my generation. In that April, we conducted an air strike against Libya because of its involvement with the bombing of a West Berlin disco. 1986 was also the year that Marcos left the Phillipines and the Chernobyl accident. The Iran-Contra scandal would also be revealed that year. And who could forget the Mets/ Red Sox series.
What else could be new? Well, three years later, the Berlin wall would fall and in a couple more years, so would the whole Soviet empire.
Billy Joel also missed that in his "We didn't start the fire" - the last lines are
Hypodermics on the shore/ China's under martial law/ Rock and roller Cola wars/ I can't take it anymore.
Billy stopped talking about the fire when it became an inferno.