Just the Way You Aren't

One of my many odd childhood memories involves my dad telling me, when I was probably seven or eight years old, that Billy Joel wrote the song “Just the Way You Are” for a wife who had stood by him through good times and bad, when he was a millionaire rock star but also when he was a depressed, boozy nobody.

Then, my father informed me, Joel divorced the wife he had written “Just the Way You Are” about and married Christie Brinkley, a staple of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues and one of the biggest sex symbols in the world.

It felt like one of those moments when the curtain of the adult world is peeled back briefly so that you can see life for how it actually is rather than how it is supposed to be.

My dad was letting me in on an open secret: pop songs lied and rock stars were professional liars. They swore undying love and devotion to women they then divorced so that they could marry supermodels and glamorous actresses.

For decades, Joel almost never performed the song live because it brought back painful memories.

It’s not unlike how Katy Perry wrote the song “Firework” for Russell Brand when they were madly in love. Now they’re divorced and Brand is getting creepier and more right-wing by the day.

Whenever I hear “Firework”, which is often, as it is a very popular song, I can’t help but think about the fact that it was written to commemorate a love that ended in acrimony, bitterness and divorce.

There is a massive difference between someone like Bill Cosby, who depicted himself as a hero and the conscience of black America while behaving monstrously and destroying countless lives, and people like Chris Pratt, John Mulaney, Taika Waititi and Billy Joel.

With those complicated, problematic figures it was more a matter of us thinking that they were each great guys and then finding out that they’re actually kind of sketchy dudes.

There’s no great shame in being a sketchy dude but also no great honor in it either. It’s the human condition but it’s also human to be disappointed when your heroes turn out to be flawed.

The #MeToo era has illustrated the tremendous danger of unchecked hero worship, individually and as a culture. The sooner we acknowledge and accept that celebrities are flawed and complicated the better off we’ll be.

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