Billy Joel - The Nylon Curtain

B: Hahahahaha! Wowzers, that's a title. I just love Billy Joel, i didn't think it would be relevant. 

S: a strange and complicated man once told us "it's all relevant." 

B: i'm not complicated, ideas are. But it is true that it depends on which hallway you're walking. We tripped over Gorbachev and now here's Billy Joel's critique of the Reagan Era, very pointedly titled The Nylon Curtain. 

Did you know this is his favorite of his own albums? He put way more effort into this one than anything before it. A motorcycle crash was involved, but that's less important. The album itself is a collage of criticisms surrounding the death of the American Dream, summarized here as the assurance of a life as good or better than your parents had, you know work hard and prosper. Even a poor scholar of Vulcan logic can tell you it sure don't look that way when the steel mills are closing, men and women can't seem to love each other, Vietnam Vets are just kind of swept under the rug and ignored, everybody's on hard drugs, and the only official response to all of it is "worship America, we're number 1." 

Wanna talk about PR problems? How do you spin the blatant and obvious discrepancy between being told a story and watching reality not work that way at all? 

I think Billy Joel is onto something here. Not about the Capitalism v Socialism crap, about the Baby Boomer generation as a whole. Kids born after WWII Kai Ryssdoled the numbers and said "yeah, this isn't gonna work for the vast majority of us because you aren't handing us enough money to pay for all the collateral damage. You're only handing us enough money to take care of one or the other, and just barely at that. 

That's not an economic problem, that a social problem caused by economic manipulation. That problem is not caused by the government, that problem is caused by the Bourgeoisie desperately trying to not slide down the slide. 

Before you get all angry and the spittle starts spraying, what am i really talking about? I'm talking about the logical contradiction between the idea that the wealthiest individuals should be privately making all the economic decisions that affect our lives and the reality that they aren't going to do anything that knowingly lowers their bank account balance. 

So, the question morphs into is this album only good because Reaganism wasn't working for the vast majority of people? Some people are likely to say that Billy Joel made millions of dollars, but those millions are the spare change from someone else's billions and he spends them paying his employees to build boats and motorcycles while pointing out that he had his turn and he is not the vast majority of people. Marx would of course argue that that is the inherent conservative bias of Capitalism and Billy Joel would probably for the most part agree. His argument, after all, is where's the orchestra, and it musically circles right back around to Allentown. 

And at this point you can say "ok, i misunderstood. I get it, i realize that this is just one little piece of the larger puzzle, and i can appreciate that, but the question still stands, where's the orchestra? Those are the chairs they sit in, and they are empty."