Song #65: Billy Joel - "Only the Good Die Young"

Song #65: Billy Joel - "Only the Good Die Young" (1977)

The Stranger

"You mighta heard I run with a dangerous crowd. We ain't too pretty, we ain't too proud. We might be laughin' a bit too loud, ah, but that never hurt no one."

I grew up on Oldies radio with my father, usually having the stations like WJMK (Jack FM, for Chicagoans who remember that) and Real Oldies 1690 be the soundtrack for our treks to the downtown train station so we can watch trains go by or when we went to my father's childhood neighborhood, stopping at the local Krispy Kreme before it closed. Growing up on Oldies radio means knowing of older songs that nobody else in my grade knew of. One of them was Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young," a song I remember hearing as a kid and loving the upbeat tempo, but never giving it much thought.

Fast-forward to late 2011, early 2012, when I took Drawing and Painting I in high school, which served as my lone, required fine-arts credit, and this song took on a new life. I sat at a table with three very great people, two juniors whom I met there for the first time, and another friend of mine, who was a sophomore like myself at the time. Our art teacher was, unsurprisingly, an eclectic soul, who would sometimes go one or two days without saying a word to us unless we asked, assuming we knew what to do with the project we were working on. The teacher would always play his own personally made mixtape, which had maybe eight songs on there, which would loop constantly. One of the songs on there was "Only the Good Die Young," which was the silver-lining in a sea of unremarkable tunes, which I struggle to even remember the name of any at this moment in time.

I used to sing it while I drew (or paint, as we did in the second quarter, where the first quarter was all about drawing), and my group of three additional friends went on to name it our theme song for the semester. It wasn't until about the seventh listen that I really stopped to pay attention to the lyrics; "the song had to mean something, didn't it?," I thought. Listening to the lyrics, I remember saying at the table, "guys, this song's about a Catholic schoolgirl losing her virginity to a bad boy." "Are you serious," my one friend said. "Bullshit," my other friend said. "Shut up and listen," I said. They were in shock. We couldn't believe that the song had a raunchier, more explicit meaning we never picked up on; they, like my younger self, were mesmerized by the catchy lyricism and infectious tempo.

"Only the Good Die Young" was never a big hit for Billy Joel for the reason that it beared a deeper, more sexual meaning. Looking at the song in 2014, when the song can be considered deceptively tame by today's standards, it's a wonderfully made song, clear when listened to with complete devotion, and wonderfully energetic and jivey. In addition, the song is seriously contemplative in terms of realizing that Catholic schools could be accused of closeting its students towards the ideas of sex and love. It will forever be looked at by me as not only a very good, intelligently-written ballad but a theme song for one of the classes I grossly underestimated in terms of impact and long-term effect.

Give "Only the Good Die Young" a listen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERWREcPIoPA