As a fan of Billy Joel’s music over the years, I’ve always found both his lyrics and music conveyed a wit and intelligence that I always assumed offered a fair portrait of the performer himself.  Over the years, interviews, stage banter, and a few personal conversations proved my theory correct.  Joel was sharp, funny, and personable.

One of the smartest things about Joel was, I found, to be his stance that politics should be left to the politicians.  He has adamantly held firm for years that his place was to perform and not push an agenda.  As recently as a 2001 Q and A session at Princeton University, Joel reiterated that point "Do I have a political message I'm trying to put out? No. I'm a friggin' piano player." 

Now that seems to have changed.  Joel has just released a new pop single, the anti-war “Christmas in Fallujah”.  In the past, he has tackled Vietnam in “Goodnight Saigon” and the Cold War (inclusively, albeit indirectly) in “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.  But “Fallujah” is different in two ways.  For one, the song is not sung by Joel himself.

He is quoted as saying he felt that, at 58, he was too old to sing it, and that it would be better off being performed by someone closer to the age of the soldiers whose letters reportedly inspired the lyrics.  Joel found that someone in the form of 21 year old Long Island performer Cass Dillon.  The other difference is the overtly political message with which the song is infused.

Lyrics compare the current war to the Crusades (“We came with the Crusaders / to save the holy land / It’s Christmas in Fallujah / and no one gives a damn”) and even seemingly draw an analogy between the current War on Terror with the ambitions of the imperialist Roman Empire (“We are the armies of the empire / We are the legionnaires of Rome”).  All of this is done with Joel’s characteristic ability to weave in personal touches of the average middle-class Joe.  As he describes a soldier’s fear that he is fading from a loved one’s memory so he’s “just as good as dead”, it’s hard not to imagine any number of our brave men and women agonizing over just such a scenario.

Yet, there is more to the song and the tone.  In it Joel, who confesses to be a student of history, shows either a distinct lack of knowledge about it or a poetic irony gone wildly off mark when he says that “we came to fight the infidel”.  Joel goes on to recite (or at least reference) the usual liberal talking points like implying this war is for oil or that we are fighting in the wrong place (“they say Osama’s in the mountains / deep in a cave near Pakistan”).  So what happened?  What caused a seemingly keen student of history and smart musician to jump off the fence and embrace the Cindy Sheehan element in his audience?

Perhaps he grew tired of not voicing his opinion while contemporaries like Bruce Springsteen or relative upstarts (comparatively speaking) like the Dixie Chicks made headlines by espousing the left’s agenda. That is not to say that his political inclinations were unknown.  He has previously contributed to the Clintons and described himself as “practically a socialist”.  But, until recently, those attitudes or ideas were not spotlighted.

“Christmas in Fallujah” seems destined to change that.  While he has flirted in the past with social relevance in muted tones and railed against everything from the commercial fishing industry (“The Downeaster Alexa”) to urban sprawl (“No Man’s Land”) to the plight of the steel workers (“Allentown”), Joel has amped his stance and begun actively attacking .  And he is more than welcome to do just that.  That is a right afforded him by the freedoms of this country.

As a matter of fact, it is a bi-product of the freedom about which he sings (“we come to bring these people freedoms”) in this song which decries our efforts to supply just that.  How many Iraqi’s who died in rape and torture rooms considered themselves poets?  How many played the piano or liked to sing?  We will never know.

We do know that Billy Joel doesn’t like this war.  How convenient for him that he doesn’t have to fight it (and this time he won’t have to burn a draft card to avoid service). How convenient for him that he doesn’t have to live with the daily fear that speaking his mind could cost him his life.  How convenient for him that he can turn the letters of soldiers in the field into a personal statement of angst penned in the comfort of his waterfront home.  And how very convenient that he chose to let someone else sing the song and, more than likely, be forever associated with its sentiments that will likely only resonate with college students and Move On.org  while leaving the Red State portion of his audience cold.  Too old?  No, maybe just too smart.