Billy Joel’s “I Go to Extremes”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #6 in March 1990.
I struggled. For sure I wanted Billy Joel, but I didn’t hate enough of the seventies singles to include any, and this means “Piano Man,” too predictably and boringly hated. Instead my choice rested between “A Modern Woman” and “I Go to Extremes.” Readers might ask, “Who?” about the former; that’s why I chose the second single and second top ten from Storm Front, Joel’s inexplicably popular 1989 album, home of the history lesson “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” for many readers the reason why this series exists.
To return to “Modern Woman” for the first and last time, Joel recorded it in 1986 for the Ruthless People soundtrack, an album that hoped to follow in the footsteps of Footloose and Purple Rain or at least White Nights but ended up somewhere behind Streets of Fire. Mick Jagger, David Stewart, and Daryl Hall wrote and produced a song for it — did you know? They don’t. Other selections include ringers by Kool and the Gang, someone named Nicole McCloud, and Streets of Fire veteran Dan Hartman. However, it also boasts Luther Vandross’ “Give Me the Reason,” one of his most pained performances, a taste of the eponymous album released a few months later (the video has the tasteless production ideas that could only have come in 1986).
Anchored to a synth line that sounded like a bad idea on 1985’s “You’re Only Human (Second Wind),” and that might’ve been used by the Pinochet torture regime, “Modern Woman” calls shit on a woman sensible enough to leave a chronic whiner and halitosis victim; it’s Annie Hall told by Alvy Singer as a vengeful zealot. He presents himself as an “old-fashioned man” laughing at what these young chicks want out of life while his graceless bray walks him to the gallows. “Makes up her face while she makes her mind”? If you think that’s hot, wait till you get to the way he enunciates “in-tel-LEC-tu-al.” Imagine an angry Howard Jones.
Fortunately, “I Go to Extremes” is almost as bad. “If it’s only ‘almost as bad,’ why didn’t you write about that one?” Well, “I Go to Extremes” is still on the radio. Produced by Foreigner-not-Clash guy Mick Jones, “I Go to Extremes” knows nothing about extremes. To create intensity, Joel resorts to the pissed-off millionaire bellow. It’s formulaic blooze-rock, a fart through cheese cloth, the decade’s dreariest, most generic crap, which made sense when you consider he released it in 1989. The drums thud too loudly, and Joel sings to match. I can’t understand why he shouts. Does he have lead in his arteries? At least on 1986’s “A Matter of Trust,” his best single of the eighties, he found a knock kneed groove that reined in his vocal excesses; clenched and worried, he sang as if he didn’t believe his own threats. And the lyrics — well. Stand or I fall. All or nuthin’ at all. Shoot for the kill. To remind us that he just sung us a song, he returns to the Piano Man, ending with a pair of boring piano variations on the main hook that make Steve Winwood look like Thelonious Monk. Indeed, “Roll With It” and Peter Gabriel inspired lots of vile shit.
Yet Storm Front isn’t terrible: “And So It Goes” and “The Downeaster ‘Alexa'” show his gift for the soft answer turning away wrath; and it took Garth Brooks to shake the moneymaker out of “Shameless.” River of Dreams, his pop swan song, is even better, to the immense shock of the ILM cohort with whom I listened to every Billy Joel song, one a day, last summer through December. And he goes to extremes on none of those performances.
Humanizing The Vacuum 
I was moved to Google worst BJ songs after coming across River of Dreams on radio. I usted to hate it with a vengence in its loooong heyday. But now, after not hearing it in ages, it just seems immensely pathetic, almost laughable. Almost. And the thing Is you might be right: it probably is not half as bad as so much of his other crap. I have older siblings who believe he is pure genius BTW.
haha thanks