Billy Joel "The Stranger" [1977]

It goes without saying that we'd all be better off had Billy Joel remained a stranger to us all, but clearly we weren't destined to be that lucky. Just hitting his stride as a sappy balladeer and glossy schlockster that makes Elton John's -- hell, Liberace's -- late-70s work seem palatable by comparison, Joel proves that no one in the Tri-State area had the slightest idea what constituted decent pop music. "The Stranger" is pretty much a time capsule of 70s suckiness: Steely Dan's wedding-band chord changes, Chuck Mangione's false jazz simple syrup, 10CC's cringe-inducing angelic backup singing, Elvis Costello's strained song construction, Springsteen's banal vignettes about uninteresting people and Boz Scaggs' antiseptic cokeheaded production. All you really need to know about why people were so depressed in the decade can be found within the grooves of this very record; being force-fed crap like this and Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver" was enough to spiral anyone into alcoholism, drug dependency and divorce. Joel did his best to bum everyone out in the 80s, too, but he never again succeeded in placing a turd in the punchbowl like he did with "The Stranger."