It's a little bit of self crit Like, yes, absolutely, in most people's minds, the 50s are the Buddy Holly decade and the 70s are the heavy metal/punk rock decade (and the Billy Joel decade) And that's kind of terrible considering, in the end, how little music matters
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Like the thing I harp on is he made the current year when he wrote the song, 1989, represented by "China's under martial law/rock and roller cola wars", which says it all really
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That none of the big recording artists took any side on Tiananmen Square that year but they DID get a lot of press over whether they did commercials for Coke or Pepsi
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The "We tried to fight it" is at least a little bit ironic, like one big thing the year-by-year nature of the song makes clear is how long the Vietnam War lasted regardless of how hard musicians protested against it (cf. the Vonnegut "custard pie from a stepladder" quote)
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Billy Joel being all "Yeah I wrote a bunch of hit songs viciously satirizing the materialism of the 70s and 80s and the materialism of the 70s and 80s gave me a nice big check and kept going"
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