Billy Joel – It’s Still Rock & Roll to Me

Rolling Stone Called It The Worst Number One Hit Of All Time. Billy Joel Had A Different View.

By May 1980, Billy Joel was furious — and doing something about it. “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” was released on May 12, 1980, as the lead single from his seventh album Glass Houses, and it was essentially a three-minute argument with every critic who had dismissed him as a soft-rock balladeer. The song was written in the back of a car on the way to a recording session, because Joel had arrived without anything prepared. Sometimes necessity and a bruised ego produce something remarkable.

The single spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 from July 19 through August 1, 1980 — Joel’s first ever chart-topper in the US. It logged eleven weeks in the top ten and was named the seventh biggest hit of the year by American Top 40. In the UK, it reached number fourteen. Glass Houses itself camped at the top of the album chart for six consecutive weeks, selling over seven million copies in the US alone. Rolling Stone, ever consistent in its disregard for Joel, later ranked the single as the worst number one hit of all time. He’s still number one.

The song was born from a specific flash of irritation. Joel read a glowing review of an unnamed new wave band and realised he had no idea what their music actually sounded like. He told Rolling Stone that new wave songs could only be about two and a half minutes long, with a very few instruments and a sound limited to what you could hear in a garage — just a return to that older sound. His argument: punk and new wave weren’t revolutionary at all. They were rock and roll in a new wardrobe. He wasn’t wrong — and he was seething about it.

The trick he pulled off in the studio was deliciously pointed. Producer Phil Ramone — his trusted collaborator since The Stranger — helped Joel record a song criticising new wave using the exact new wave sound Joel was mocking: tight, sparse, guitar-forward, minimal. Sound engineer had drummer Liberty DeVitto tune his snare drum extremely low so it would “flop” when he played it — a very deliberate, very stripped-back choice. After Joel realised the chord progression was essentially the same one Bob Dylan used on “Lay Lady Lay,” he kept it anyway. The references in the lyrics to the “miracle mile” and whitewall tires were real places from Joel’s Long Island childhood — Best Tire and Berliner Stereo on a stretch of road in Manhasset where he grew up.

Glass Houses was the last album featuring the original Billy Joel Band — DeVitto, Doug Stegmeyer, Richie Cannata, Russell Javors, and new lead guitarist David Brown — all intact. In 1981, Joel won the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for his work on the album. The irony of winning a Grammy for an album designed as a middle finger to critical gatekeepers would not have been lost on him.

Boogie Down Productions interpolated the song in their 1987 diss track “The Bridge Is Over,” which repurposed the melody for a very different kind of argument. Weird Al Yankovic wrote “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me” as a parody in 1980 but never released it, later admitting it had felt dated by the time his first album came out in 1983 — and that Joel’s blessing seemed unlikely. Drake Bell covered it in 2014 on his rockabilly album Ready Steady Go!.

Joel once summed up his instinct plainly: “In my neighborhood, somebody hits you, you hit them right back.” The former amateur boxer who won 23 of his 26 teenage fights didn’t need a recording studio to understand counterattack. He just needed a car ride and a deadline. The song that critics dismissed as hollow became his defining commercial breakthrough — proof that the Piano Man could rock, and that he knew exactly what he was doing all along.