Billy Joel's Uptown Girl / USHER's A-Town Girl

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Billy Joel's Uptown Girl / USHER's A-Town Girl

Double features mean half the writing. Lucky me.

I kid.

I was thinking of writing about USHER (WHY oh why do some artists write their names in all-caps? Is it to emphasize their idol status?) and Latto's "A-Town Girl", and, because it has so many similarities to Billy Joel's original, I felt it made sense to talk about how annoying "Uptown Girl" is.

Which is to say, it's a great song, perfectly proportioned and perfectly written, but it's also dead stupid, with nearly no progression in the song in its three-minute frame. Not that a song needs one, anyway. There's the clever tug-and-pull of "She's been living in her uptown world, / I bet she never had a backstreet guy." There's the brief suggestion of passion, though imaginary, in "She's been living in her white bread world / as long as anyone with hot blood can," that "can" sung with nearly erotic excitement. There's the sudden drop-off from "And when she kno-o-o-o-ows what she wa-a-a-ants from her t-yi-yi-yime, / and when she w-a-a-a-akes up and m-a-a-a-akes up her m-yi-yi-yind" to the earthy "She'll see I'm not so tough", where "tough" is slyly a long syllable. Obviously there is the micro-rhyme with that, "not so tough / just because, I'm in love / with an uptown girl" pedalling immediately to the second verse. Perhaps the true cleverness is that the song paints not just a psychological portrait of its subject, the eponymous uptown girl, but paints an even more detailed picture of its singer, who wants to pretend he's better than love and full of manliness, probably as a means to compensate. Finally, the soaring "She's my uptown girl!" giving the listener the brief feel of victory, even if only in song.

I don't have a beef with "Uptown Girl", but I always have a "But". My favorite "But" is: But, Uptown Girl is basically an inferior version of Paul Simon's "Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes". Paul Simon wrote a superior version of this song with excellent pacing, enough slow moments to connect with our hero and enough fast moments to feel the emotional rush. But that's what "Uptown Girl" is: all rush, all masculine pride, all underdog energy. It's a great karaoke song, it's a great party song, it embodies joy and headstrong impulse, and so, as a music nerd, I can decry it all I want for not working well in my bedroom, I still have to admit it's a wonderful song. Goodness, though, someone needs to douse the fire out of that overactive tambourine.

To hear that USHER took on the most annoying song ever prompted hearty "I don't know..." expressions, but, spoilers, I really like the song. It's an interesting contrast between one of the most prominent pop artists 40 years ago to one of the most prominent now-ish or 2000s-ish.

I think the most interesting split is that USHER, gun to his head, can actually give details about the object of his affection. The song, while not giving up the red-bloodedness of the original, is more fitting for our modern attitude toward gender and sexuality. For example, USHER actually knows where the girl comes from! (Over, you know, objectifying her based on her wealth!) "She from the A-T-L-A-N-T-A, / rep zone 6, folks from Cascade, / learned how to skate when she was in first grade, / went to Clark, ain't graduate, / moved up out of Buckhead to escape the city, / breakfast at Barney's, she's so ratchet, yeah she so sadity." (I don't know what "sadity" means either.) In this sense, I prefer USHER's literateness, his attention to detail, over Joel's simplistic-as-to-almost-be-mythological approach.

Something in common with "Uptown Girl": meticulousness over how words are sung. This is one of the defining traits of pop, the way words are sung over what they are. Your brain may not have noticed, but the flow slows at the beginning of the "moved up out of Buckhead" lyric, probably for two reasons: 1) "moved up" and "Buckhead" are awkward, syllabically ("Buckhead" is a hell of a word, dropping the tongue down then elongating it from the "ea" dipthong) and 2) this is where he starts painting more intimate details on who she is now. 2) becomes prominent in the succeeding lyric: "She be outside, / but stay out the way, at the same time, / working out her body down at Lifetime." I quite like that last lyric, the way the r's ("wor-king", "her") and d's ("bo-dy", "d-own") depict a motion that's probably an analogy for USHER's eye movement. Also interesting is how it speeds up, with the first line being very short, the second line cut up by commas, and then the third, which suggests carnal desire, sung all in one go.

Then the best lyric of the song: "Her / new / nigga, / prob-bly a drug deal-luh, / she say that she love 'um but never posts his pict-chuh." Never mind the conscious use of u-sounds - this is, as the kids say, a "flex", an amusing psychological observation between men. You know USHER is spreading doubts by the extra layer of autotune on "love 'um" or "pict-chuh".

Then the chorus: after a triumphant "Yeah!" from the guy whose most famous song may be "Yeah!", he sings, "I can tell by the way that you twerk / she from 'round here, I gotta pull up on her, / every time I'm down here, I try to get her to move to LA, / but she say that she can't," where I love the little (unsaid) back-and-forth between our singer and the song's subject. And, of course, the repetition of "here" is perfectly executed.

To get it out of the way: Latto is perfectly fine and I have nothing more to say about her verses.

Not to say the song is better than "Uptown Girl". For example, the original's brevity gives it a definitive character. You know exactly what the song is and can have it symbolize anything. "A-Town Girl" is far too specific to be about anything except really USHER and this fictional character. But...I prefer that, bookworm as I am.

Not saying anything personal about Billy Joel, but it's funny that the original "Uptown Girl" is about his future-but-not-now wife Christie Brinkley. You do, indeed, get the sense Joel is objectifying the woman in his song, and the interesting irony is that he ridicules himself in the course of the song. By looking down at the object of his desire, he's kinda looking down at himself. Not that USHER is a saint. I'm not trying to impress as a bleeding heart feminist, but I prefer more detail, more accuracy, more color, over less, sometimes even in my vicarious art.

It's funny how dumb pop can be, precisely how it's a dumbified version of R&B, which began as the means for certain people in America to express their pain, and their joy in spite of that pain; pop is occasionally (occasionally! not even the majority of the time!) really creative ways to carve shibboleths around emotions, our range of and our freedom of feeling. That's what "Uptown Girl" is to me: it's a codification, or rather, a re-codification of sexual mores that works really well for men like Billy Joel but not really for anyone else. (Codes are sometimes beneficial, absent any guideline for conduct, which scenario I do wonder we're running into in this recent cultural landscape, given the current state of pop ex. super-horny or super-sterile and no in-between.) I do wonder if Joel himself does not care for this contextualization of his song. (I do like horny songs, but they look more like "Hot for Teacher".)

But beyond all the pretentious intellectualism and cultural commentary of it all, one lyric explains why I prefer this song: "You can find her at Ladies Love R&B Wednesday, / singing with my nigga Keith." USHER is just happy that the girl likes his friends. It's a cute touch. I guess, overall, it's a cute song. I prefer the warmth of this song over the original's overwhelming heat.