There’s a definite “can’t believe my luck” quality to almost every song on the record. I always listened to the record that this came from as a concept album about an ugly bloke who found himself dating a model and couldn’t believe his luck. On some of the harmonies, you even get an even richer counter-harmony going on that’s no less beautiful. There’s a lovely richness to the harmonies, an internal tension (bordering on dissonance) that you also hear in Abba songs sometimes (maybe it’s the classical training). It’s obviously done with a lot of love and, also, in 1983, it took some doing to totally shut out any 1980s production mores from a Four Seasons pastiche. **It’s Still Rock’n’Roll To Me from 1980 contains an embarrassing lyric of bullish squareness and refusal to follow fashion on a par with Bruce Foxton’s hysterical Carnaby Street: “Why should we accept the change and buy clothes of today?” Too right, thought BJ.įor what it’s worth, I would give this an 9.
#Uptown girl billy joel karaoke tv#
Cascading harmonies on the intro, then widdly guitar solo, much shouting of “east” and “west” by overage cheerleaders… it ends up something like a tv theme for a programme on restart jobs for the over 50s. *A year after Uptown Girl, the Beach Boys and Four Seasons teamed up for a 45 called East Meets West. As with Undercover’s Fisher Price version of Baker Street, though, it took a future Popular entry of staggering vacuousness for me to finally appreciate the craft of the original.Ī quick nod to The Longest Time, something like the 5th single from An Innocent Man, which is a rather sweet a cappella doo wop pastiche. Got my goat at the time as no one seemed to give two hoots as to Uptown Girl’s sources – I don’t remember a solitary mention of the Four Seasons when this got airplay. So Billy, for once, was kind of a step ahead of the pop pack**.
#Uptown girl billy joel karaoke update#
It’s better than a sexless update of Grease, as there were contemporary cinematic connections – the John Hughes movies, from memory, are all about class, crossing the tracks, trying to pull someone who should be beyond your reach. Besides, the Four Seasons and Beach Boys were both adept at laddish bonhomie as well as pining for Ronnie, Wendy, Rhonda or Sherry*. As a man in a permanent New York state of mind, I’d guess BJ had little time for the car crazy clean cut California quintet and was a Frankie Valli man to the core. This is 100% a Four Seasons tribute, or am I rather misreading your comments? The “fi-yi-yine” is a direct lift from Big Girls Don’t Cry-yi-yi the story is (deliberately, I’d guess) the inverse of Rag Doll. « CULTURE CLUB – “Karma Chameleon” THE FLYING PICKETS – “Only You” » Comments 1 2 3 » All
Those endless runs of “oh-oh-whoas” are the main reason to listen to the song, and they’re a tip off as to where it’s really coming from, in spirit if not in music: not the street heat of Frankie Valli but the lusty lads-together innocence of the Beach Boys. It isn’t a record about bedding an uptown girl or wanting to bed an uptown girl, it’s a record about remembering wanting to bed an uptown girl, and boasting to your blue-collar buds that that’s what you were gonna do, and wanting to have blue-collar buds to boast to! The video makes this explicit with Christine Brinkley as pin-up come to life, but it’s in the song too, in the husky, hearty interplay of those cascading backing vox, whose prominence makes it obvious that the guys – not the girl – are the chief audience for Joel’s talk. Of course Billy Joel is smart enough to realise this, and “Uptown Girl” works because it’s history written by the winners. There’s nothing at stake in “Uptown Girl” – how could there be? Rock and roll moved uptown long ago. The street music – doo-wop and rock’n’roll – that “Uptown Girl” draws energy from was able to speak so powerfully to sexual and social codes partly because the act of addressing those codes head-on was itself a breach of them. Billy Joel pays tribute to the music of his childhood, and so inevitably there’s something childish about “Uptown Girl”: its instant singability makes it sound like a Grease outtake, except there was more sex and chemistry in Grease’s flirtatious goofery.
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