I was never a big Billy Joel fan but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have married him when I had the shot. Yes, that could have been MY LIFE. I could have been Mrs. Billy Joel, the uptown girl, living in an uptown world. If only.
It was the early Eighties, and I was a waitress at a nouveau-hot restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Early one Saturday night, a limo pulled up out front. Out stumbled two guys who looked like trouble. I was drawn. I’ve always enjoyed a nice batch of trouble.
I watched from my station on the balcony as the limo riders were led up the stairs to my empty section. The short one was disruptive, singing to the Billy Joel tape that was playing throughout the restaurant. He began waving from the steps like an emperor, claiming, “Hi, I’m Billy Joel! I’m Billy Joel!”
Luke Spiller’s Mercurial (as in Freddie) vocals and propensity for a singalong chorus have earned The Struts millions of YouTube views and a number one placing on Spotify’s Viral Top 50 (for this very song).
It also has fans hailing them as the Next Big Thing, which, unfortunately, they are not.
Not because they aren’t a good, exciting band. But because we’ve seen this not pan out before. Their retro Anthem Rock sound with the glammily androgynous, big-voiced, Jagger-swaggering front man is an update of The Darkness for the 2010’s. The Darkness were an engaging retro rock band, too.
But they didn’t change the world. Because the world isn’t ready for that change. I don’t know if Rock will ever again be what it once was–the dominant form of popular music for young music consumers. But at last check, albums like Everybody Wants The Struts weren’t showing promise of elbowing Drake and Kanye from the Billboard Top 40.
Still, with songs like this stirring ode to giving life your all (reminiscent of some of Frank Turner’s better work) the Struts certainly deserve to find an audience.
Even if that audience will likely never be a Queen-sized one.
As much as we love our favorite artists, it’s hard to say that any of them are perfect. Here are 22 iconic artists who have been briefly lured by drugs, laziness, novelty, over-production, poor judgement or, in the case of Brian Wilson, rap music.
Elvis Presley, “Confidence” (1967)
Picking the worst song Elvis recorded for his wretched Sixties flicks is a little like picking your least favorite terminal disease. But where the exceptionally strong-stomached can at least find some camp pleasure in goofy junk like “Yoga Is as Yoga Does” or “He’s Your Uncle Not Your Dad,” this worthless rewrite of “High Hopes” from 1967’s Clambake is about as fun as a tetanus shot – and less memorable. The lamest of the 42 songs that Sid Tepper and Roy C. Bennett wrote for the King, it’s dragged even further down by its grating kiddie chorus, a cartoonish backing track and Elvis himself, who sings as though contractually obligated to convey no human emotion…
David Bowie, “The Laughing Gnome” (1967)
The laughing gas is cranked up to 11 throughout this novelty number featuring the helium-esque, sped-up vocals of producer Gus Dudgeon and a giddy 19-year-old icon-to-be. Featuring a bassoon line Bowie would later employ in “Speed of Life” and elsewhere, the track is punctuated by a punishing barrage of gnomic wordplay and displays a dedication to chart life by any means necessary. (It reached Number Six upon its re-release in 1973.) Bowie threatened, but did not deliver, a “Velvet Underground-influenced” live version in 1990. “I should have done more for gnomes,” he later told NME. “I really could have produced a new sensibility for the garden gnome in Britain.”
Love songs are where we get our passion, our soul — and most of our worst ideas.
Throughout human history, oceans have been crossed, mountains have been scaled, and great families have blossomed — all because of a few simple chords and a melody that inflamed a heart and propelled it on a noble, romantic mission.
On the other hand, that time you told that girl you just started seeing that you would “catch a grenade” for her? You did that because of a love song. And it wasn’t exactly a coincidence that she suddenly decided to “lose your number” and move back to Milwaukee to “figure some stuff out.”
That time you held that boom box over your head outside your ex’s house? You did that because of a love song. And 50 hours of community service later, you’re still not back together.
Love songs are great. They make our hearts beat faster. They inspire us to take risks and put our feelings on the line. And they give us terrible, terrible ideas about how actual, real-life human relationships should work.
Every Moment Has A Song 