God, what a pompous ass. Textbook projection. Wanna bet Ron has a heavily foxed, falling-apart copy of Catcher in the Rye somewhere near his bed-post? Probably hidden behind a bookstore-fresh, never-read copy of Franny and Zooey.

Not that I'm much of a Billy Joel fan. "We Didn't Start The Fire" is galactically bad, and most of his stuff is kind of eh. Rosenbaum's right about "Allentown" being crap, but not because of any sort of imagined contempt. The song is phony, artifical and worse, schmaltz. It's a college-student's idea of what life's like, and what it used to be like, in a dying factory town. It's an act of imagination by a not-particularly-imaginative hack. But Joel was occasionally a skilled hack on other occasions - I liked "River of Dreams" and some of his blue-eyed soul stuff - so I'm inclined to give him an existential pass.

Just don't make me listen to "We Didn't Start The Fire" or "Allentown" again.