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Grammys unveil 2026 ceremony date, new categories

Grammys unveil 2026 ceremony date, new categories

Yahoo12-06-2025
The 2026 Grammy Awards will take place on Sunday, Feb. 1, the Recording Academy announced Thursday, along with the addition of two new categories.
Set to broadcast live from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, the 68th Annual Grammy Awards will air at 8:00 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on CBS and stream on Paramount+.
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Nominations will be announced on Friday, Nov. 7 for work released between Aug. 31, 2024 and Aug. 30, 2025.
Best Traditional Country Album and Best Album Cover are the two new categories. The Recording Academy also made several updates to its rulebook. All of these changes are effective immediately.
"The Academy's top priority is to represent the music people that we serve each year," said Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy. "That entails listening carefully to our members to make sure our rules and guidelines reflect today's music and allow us to accurately recognize as many deserving creators as possible. As we kick off another exciting Grammy Season, we look forward to celebrating the amazing power of music and its ability to bring so many people together."
The category updates are as follows:
General Field
Eligibility for Best New Artist has been expanded to include artists who have been previously nominated in Album of the Year, but whose contributions fell below the current 20 percent playing time threshold. This update allows acts who were credited as featured artists on projects that were Grammy-nominated for Album of the Year in a previous awards cycle to be eligible for Best New Artist consideration.
Country Field
The existing Best Country Album Category has been renamed Best Contemporary Country Album, and a new Category, Best Traditional Country Album, has been added.
Classical Field
In Classical Categories, composers and lyricists/librettists are now eligible for Grammy recognition alongside all other key creative personnel including artists, producers, and engineers on winning albums.
Packaging Field
The existing Best Recording Package and Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package Categories have been combined into one single Category: Best Recording Package. A new Category, Best Album Cover, has also been added.
The physical product eligibility requirement for Best Recording Package, Best Album Notes, and Best Historical Album has also been expanded to be more representative of today's marketplace. This change ensures that physical album packages sold directly to fans through an artist's or label's website are eligible for Grammy consideration.
Additionally, the Craft Committee serving in this field is transitioning from a regional to a national model.
Category Definition, Eligibility, & Criteria Updates
Minor updates to definitions, eligibility and criteria across multiple fields and awards have been reviewed and revised to be more expansive and inclusive. A full list of those changes can be found on page six of the rulebook.
See the key dates for the 2026 Grammys below.
Aug. 31, 2024-Aug. 30, 2025: Product eligibility period
July 7-Aug. 22: Media company registration period
July 16-Aug. 29: Online entry period
Oct. 3-15: First round voting
Nov. 7: Nominees announced
Dec. 12, 2025-Jan. 5, 2026: Final round voting
Feb. 1, 2026: The 68th Annual Grammy Awards
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'You need to get it before you need it': Julie Chen Moonves on the plastic surgery tip she got at 27 — and how she's learned to embrace aging
'You need to get it before you need it': Julie Chen Moonves on the plastic surgery tip she got at 27 — and how she's learned to embrace aging

Yahoo

time28 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

'You need to get it before you need it': Julie Chen Moonves on the plastic surgery tip she got at 27 — and how she's learned to embrace aging

"You don't want to look different. You want to look rested." It feels like Julie Chen Moonves has always been on our screens, starting out as a news anchor before helming CBS series like The Talk and Big Brother, the latter of which made its debut 25 years ago. As a woman in TV, that high profile has meant being targeted by critics. As we chat for Yahoo's Unapologetically series, Chen Moonves tells me that she has "developed a thicker skin" over the years, but that wasn't always the case. 'With Season 1 of Big Brother — even before digital social media, where everyone could be your critic — I dealt with critics,' Chen Moonves says. 'That cut deep, but it was a scar that healed, and that battle scar — I feel like I grew from it. It made me stronger. It made me work harder to prove them wrong. So I'm proud of those battle scars.' And she's still here, currently hosting the just-launched 27th season of Big Brother. Chen Moonves was just 30 when the reality TV series first premiered; she's now 55, and credits aging and her career longevity with helping her find "wisdom and security." 'By the time you're in your 50s, you know who you are, and you don't care so much about what other people think,' she notes. 'So the wisdom that has come with aging, I love that. The security, the sense of not being insecure anymore. Because, guess what: [Critics] were never thinking about you to begin with; they're worrying about themselves.' What else has Chen Moonves learned? Here's how a makeup artist's facelift tip helped her make peace with aging — and why she's happier in sweats than the glam outfits she wears on television. You mentioned that aging has allowed you to let go of what other people think. Was there a particular turning point that empowered you to do that? When I turned 40, a few things happened at the same time: Three months earlier, I had just had a child. So when your focus shifts to another human being and their well-being, it takes it off of you. Turning 40, you start thinking, Am I going to lose my vibrancy and what makes me feel attractive or look attractive? Am I going to be viewed as someone who is still youthful? And I began to [take] better care of myself. In your 20s, you take things for granted, and in your 40s, you have to work more at it. I have to move it or I'm going to lose it. So I'd say when I became a mom and turned 40, things started to shift to having a better, healthier approach. What's your general approach to aging these days? My general approach is avoiding the sun, eating right, movement every day, even if it's just a walk. It's not just being rigid with diet and exercise. You have to have a balance and have friends and love and relationships in your life. [I'm also] not depriving myself of things that are a guilty pleasure, like a whole sleeve of Pringles. How has your approach to beauty shifted over time? My general approach to beauty has completely shifted from when I was in my 20s. It was all about, like, I need a full face of makeup to go out to feel good about myself. As I've gotten older, it's more about — first of all, when you put on makeup and powder, it falls into the little cracks, and it ages you. Now I'm more about good, clean, natural skin with no makeup on and just a little nice lipstick. I have a very pretty, powerful, deep magenta color that I'll wear year-round; it's not just for winter. And glowy skin. Taking care of your skin is the most important aspect. And [when] you feel beautiful, you look beautiful. Given your beauty philosophy evolving, I'm curious how you feel when looking back at old episodes of? What do you find yourself focusing on when you see yourself? I feel very positive about it, and it's funny, because as you do get older, and you look back, [you think] I was so critical of myself back then. [Now] I'm like, Hey, you know, it's not so bad. It's actually pretty good. You learn how to be more forgiving. I like the archive. I like the history of it all. There might be some hairstyles or a fashion choice I made that I go, Maybe that wasn't the best. But I always look back with fondness. I know you've been open about plastic surgery. What words of wisdom would you share with anyone who's debating whether it's for them? I'd say don't get carried away, because I have been there — where you feel so transformed, and you're like, What else can I do? That's when it gets out of control. When I was 27, I worked with a makeup artist who was 47, and she told me she was getting a lower facelift. And I'm like, "You're crazy. You don't need it." She said, "You need to get it before you need it." And that stuck with me, because when she came back, I was amazed at how incredible she looked. And it wasn't obvious. She just looked fresh as a daisy. 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So I feel good. That kind of ties into another topic I'd love to explore, which is self-image and identity. How do you feel these days versus, say, your 20s? I have always been that girl who wears the sweat socks while putting on flip-flops. I was that person in sweatpants in college. I'm still that person, and that person will never go away. That's who I am at my core. For work, I look at the beautiful clothes that are [picked out] for me as a uniform. That is my professional obligation to represent and to look polished. But [when] I get home like that, makeup, the hair extensions, the false lashes, any fake hair that's attached to me, that comes off first. I'm scrubbing off the makeup, and then come out in sweatpants, elastic waistbands. I am that person who wants to live in 100% cotton with elasticity around the waist and have on sweatpants and then no heels, something flat: flip-flop with a sweatpant and hair in a bun, a big sweatshirt, and maybe, like a hoodie. 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PBS and NPR defunded. Colbert cancelled. This is silencing political critics.
PBS and NPR defunded. Colbert cancelled. This is silencing political critics.

USA Today

time31 minutes ago

  • USA Today

PBS and NPR defunded. Colbert cancelled. This is silencing political critics.

The Trump administration has already defunded NPR and PBS. Now the most popular comedian on television is being booted off the air. 'Go f--- yourself.' That was just one of the many 'witticisms' Stephen Colbert had for President Donald Trump and his "Late Show" audience on July 21, his first since breaking the news the show was coming to an end. Not in a year. Not after a farewell tour. Next May. No replacement. No streaming continuation. Yes, CBS made what it called an "agonizing" business decision to cancel the most-watched show at 11:30 p.m. ET/PT, just days after Colbert mocked the network's parent company for a $16 million payout to Trump. Colbert thanked CBS but also criticized its anonymous leak to the New York Post that the show loses between $40 million and $50 million a year amid falling ratings and advertising for late-night TV shows. On the one hand, you have those arguing this is simply a case of corporate cost cutting and media evolving. While others are raising the alarm this is a political decision disguised as a financial one. Both can be – and are – true at the same time. Ironically, Colbert can trace success to Trump monologues Before Colbert called his bosses' bosses' settlement with Trump a 'big fat bribe," his "Late Show" monologues have taken direct aim – nightly – at authoritarianism, misinformation, corporate cowardice and Trump for nearly a decade. One could even argue that he owes his success to Trump, because during his initial months at 'Late Show,' Colbert faltered in the ratings. In 2017, however, he began to see a surge of success as he got to mock Trump 1.0 in his monologues. Soon his show was No. 1 in late night, a ranking it held for nine straight TV seasons while simultaneously racking up 33 consecutive Emmy nominations. Colbert became a go-to voice for Trump-resistant Americans who enjoyed their political despair with a side of satire. In many ways, he took up the mantle left by his old boss, Jon Stewart, offering comedic catharsis in chaotic times. Despite this context, CBS claimed the decision to cancel was purely financial and 'not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.' According to the company, the show had become too expensive to produce amid shrinking ad revenues and changing viewer habits. Opinion: Paramount's shameful CBS settlement with Trump deserves congressional scrutiny CBS is not wrong: Late-night advertising has by some estimates dropped by half since 2018. Anecdotally, I watch a lot of late-night viral clips on my phone, but I can't tell you the last time I watched any late-night television live on my television. But not everyone's buying the "it's just business" line. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, called for scrutiny while Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California, who taped the July 17 show when Colbert broke the news, echoed the concern. The Writers Guild of America issued a statement suggesting the move raises 'significant concerns' about political retribution. There are countless scathing opinion columns, letters to the editor and social media posts containing similar sentiments. Meanwhile, Trump gloated. He posted on Truth Social, "I absolutely love that Colbert' got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next." CBS is part of merger that needs Trump administration approval CBS is just one part of a massive merger between Paramount Global and Skydance. However, the deal is still pending approval from the Federal Communications Commission, more than a year after the proposed merger was announced. The chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, was appointed by Trump. If you need a clue about whether his loyalties lie with the Constitution or the current occupant of the White House, Carr swapped out an American flag lapel pin for a gold medallion in the shape of Trump's profile just months ago. When corporations' incentives line up so conveniently with silencing dissent, we should be alarmed. Because both things can be true: The economics of late-night television, and the cultural influence of it, has been changing. And the timing of the settlement combined with the end of the "Late Show" is deeply concerning. Here is how it appears: The Trump administration made it clear that certain media deals wouldn't get approved unless certain broadcasting decisions were made. That would be the government using its power to punish dissent and influence private business decisions in order for political favor. Opinion: I wouldn't be a journalist without my college paper. Students deserve that chance. Jon Stewart warned that comedians will get sent away first In his 2022 Mark Twain Prize acceptance speech, Jon Stewart warned, 'When a society is under threat, comedians are the ones who get sent away first. It's just a reminder to people that democracy is under threat. Authoritarians are the threat to comedy, to art, to music, to thought, to poetry, to progress, to all those things.' That's the part that should concern us. The question isn't what happens to Colbert (he will be fine). It's what happens to us: the audience, the public, the people who depend on sharp, fearless voices to cut through the fog. The federal government defunded NPR and PBS. Now one of the most popular comedians on television is being nudged off the air. At what point do we stop calling this "just a business decision" and start calling it slow, strategic silencing? Because when cost cutting trims away the voices willing to laugh at power in real time, what's really being cut is dissent. And if that's not political, then what is? Kristin Brey is the "My Take" columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where this column originally appeared.

All 43 of Billy Joel's Hot 100 hits, ranked from worst to best
All 43 of Billy Joel's Hot 100 hits, ranked from worst to best

Los Angeles Times

time31 minutes ago

  • Los Angeles Times

All 43 of Billy Joel's Hot 100 hits, ranked from worst to best

If a musician's legacy can be judged by which of his peers are willing to show up and sing his praises in a documentary about him, consider Billy Joel's in good standing: Among the A-listers in HBO's new two-part 'And So It Goes' are Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Garth Brooks, Pink, Sting, Jackson Browne and Nas. Directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, the doc goes over Joel's life and career at a moment when he's received just about every award a pop musician can receive, including the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the Kennedy Center Honors, induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame and five Grammy Awards on 23 nominations. Less happily, it also comes as Joel has been forced from the concert stage after being diagnosed this year with a brain disorder called normal pressure hydrocephalus. Yet the 76-year-old singer and songwriter remains a much-talked-about pop-culture fixture, not least on TikTok, where his oldie 'Zanzibar' never seems far from cropping up on one's scroll. Ahead of Friday's premiere of the HBO documentary's second installment, I've ranked all 43 of Joel's singles that have charted on Billboard's Hot 100, starting with the worst and ending with the best. (Due to Joel's choices and/or Billboard's methodology, that means that some of his best-known tunes aren't here: 'Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,' for instance, and 'New York State of Mind.') Feel free as you read to open a bottle of white, a bottle of red — or, perhaps, a bottle of rosé instead. In the middle of the night … I'm still haunted by this mawkish pileup of gospel signifiers. This widely interpreted ballad about a lover's steadfast devotion only works when it's sung extremely well (as in the case of Adele) or when it's sung extremely terribly (as with Bob Dylan, who wrote it). Joel's take lands somewhere in between, which means he just sounds like somebody's drunk uncle. For decades after 1993's 'River of Dreams' — still his most recent pop album — Joel insisted he'd run out of things to say as a songwriter. 'You need inspiration to create good new music,' he told me in 2023, 'and if you don't have it, don't bother.' Inexplicably, he found a spark in an unfinished tune presented to him by a younger musician named Freddy Wexler; together, the two completed this would-be OneRepublic song, which Joel premiered live at the Grammy Awards last year. 'Turn the Lights Back On' spent a single week on the Hot 100 before dropping off the chart — the shortest stay of any of Joel's hits. No surprise that a guy long characterized as a mere imitation artist would nail Elvis Presley's vocal delivery in a cover recorded for the soundtrack of 'Honeymoon in Vegas.' Turgid midtempo rock with a lyric that defines soul rather pitifully as 'knowing what someone is feeling.' Features backing vocals by the sex-you-uppers of Color Me Badd. Six months after 'Piano Man' put him on the map, Joel was already straining against the brutal market economics of pop stardom: 'If I go cold, I won't get sold / I'll get put in the back in the discount rack, like another can of beans.' Yet his kvetching about the creative constraints of the pop song are pretty rich coming from a master of the form. Perhaps his most strained vocal performance. In the watery pantheon of rock songs about boats, this maudlin fisherman's lament ranks well behind 'Sailing' and 'Southern Cross' (to say nothing of 'Proud Mary' and 'Sloop John B'). The right idea; the wrong execution. From the weirdly stacked soundtrack of 'Ruthless People,' which also featured Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen and Luther Vandross. Very stiff singing atop a very funky groove. Are those steel drums I hear? 'It's almost like a dying man singing to his child,' Joel told his biographer Fred Schruers, which may or may not have been the approach his then-9-year-old daughter Alexa was hoping her dad would take. Still, the elegant harmonic movement demonstrates his lifelong devotion to classical music; seven years later, he'd make his debut as a composer with the solo-piano 'Fantasies & Delusions.' Among those who've sung 'Lullabye' since Joel introduced it: Celine Dion, Rufus Wainwright — and John Stamos. One surely gratifying endorsement for this banjo-driven country shuffle: In 1999, Dolly Parton cut a version of 'Travelin' Prayer' to open the first volume in her acclaimed trilogy of bluegrass albums. Having split with producer Phil Ramone after 1986's 'The Bridge' LP, Joel hired Mick Jones of Foreigner to oversee his next album, 'Storm Front,' which opened with this delightfully trashy ode to a woman with little interest in mink coats or satin sheets. (Call it 'Downtown Girl.') Jones' production, with its stabbing synths and boxy drums, echoes the steroidal rock of Robert Palmer's 'Addicted to Love.' Wrote Robert Christgau of Joel in the Village Voice: 'Even in arena mode he's a force of nature and bad taste.' An OK song ranked this high only because it so strongly evokes a perfect one (in this case, 'Wedding Bell Blues' by the 5th Dimension). Consider that this jittery New Wave rocker about the pros and cons of phone sex arrived on an album ('Glass Houses') that also featured 'I Don't Want to Be Alone' and 'Sleeping With the Television On.' Imagine if he'd had Tinder. Possibly the purest distillation of Joel's romantic pessimism — 'Some love is just a lie of the soul / A constant battle for the ultimate state of control' — with the twist that he's assuring a lover that everything that always happens won't happen to them. (It happened to them.) A slow-rolling R&B ditty where the object of the dude's affection isn't a woman but a piano (except it's actually Ray Charles, who shows up to duet with his eager admirer). One of two new tracks added as consumer bait to Joel's 23-times-platinum 'Greatest Hits — Volume I & Volume II,' this deeply spooked synth-rock joint might be the strangest entry on this list: horny-frustrated lyrics, no real melody, just straight burnt-to-a-crisp Willy Loman vibes for 5½ meandering minutes. It's great! (It's also, as of this writing, the second-least-streamed of these 43 tracks on Spotify, with fewer than 2 million plays.) The peppiest single Joel ever made might get even closer to Motown's classic Holland-Dozier-Holland sound than Phil Collins did a year earlier in his punctilious remake of the Supremes' 'You Can't Hurry Love.' Yet 'Tell Her About It' has no fan in its creator, who said in Schruers' biography that the song is 'a little too bubblegum' — one reason Joel appears not to have played it in concert since the early 1990s. For this nearly a cappella doo-wop number, Joel sang every vocal part himself when a group he and Ramone had brought into the studio couldn't stay in tune. Four years after 'The Longest Time' charted, Bobby McFerrin topped the Hot 100 with the instrument-less 'Don't Worry, Be Happy'; three years after that, Boyz II Men got to No. 2 with the a cappella 'It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.' Billy at his breeziest. With half a dozen Top 30 singles, including this homage to the Drifters, 'An Innocent Man' became Joel's fourth consecutive LP to be nominated for album of the year at the Grammys. (He lost, reasonably, to 'Thriller.') The title track is a showcase of vocal flexibility as he moves nimbly from a croon to a belt to a falsetto. Rooted, as he told Schruers, in 'the realization that Elle Macpherson and I were not meant for the ages,' this tense and brooding song is Joel's finest contribution to the soulful-white-guy rock of the mid-1980s; it belongs up there with Don Henley's 'The Boys of Summer' and Steve Winwood's 'Higher Love,' thanks in no small part to a spidery guitar solo by David Brown (who died last year). When Joel played 'This Is the Time' at New York's Shea Stadium just before the Mets' home was demolished in 2008, he brought out John Mayer to do the solo — an experience you can bet Mayer channeled as he cut 2021's soulful-white-guy 'Sob Rock.' Picture Huey Lewis doing Natalie Cole's 'This Will Be.' A decade after he released the studio version, Joel charted with a concert recording of the lead single from his 1971 debut — the LP notoriously mastered at the wrong speed so that his voice sounded higher and squeakier than it really was. Here, onstage at the Paradise club in Boston, his singing has a courtly charm that makes 'She's Got a Way' feel like Joel's version of Paul McCartney's 'Maybe I'm Amazed.' Joel's most Dylanesque lyric, meanwhile, comes across as his version of 'Just Like a Woman.' An unsparing ballad about how nobody tells the truth anymore, 'Honesty' earned a song of the year nod at the Grammys but lost to the Doobie Brothers' 'What a Fool Believes,' which is narrated by a guy who can't accept the truth he's being told. Covered later — and quite convincingly — by Beyoncé. Written as Joel returned to New York following his early-'70s sojourn in Los Angeles, this Ronettes-inspired confection first appeared on the 'Turnstiles' LP in 1976. But 'Say Goodbye to Hollywood' didn't blow up until five years later, when he put a slightly rowdier live rendition on 1981's 'Songs in the Attic' LP — by which time Ronnie Spector herself had taken a crack at the song with help from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. A febrile Cold War freak-out with a hideous, Cronenberg-lite music video. Joel told Schruers he could envision his survivors playing this very pretty ballad at his funeral, which is certainly one place for a song about the inevitability of pain. Was 'Glass Houses' truly Joel's punk album? Take it from no less an authority than the Chipmunks, who performed the LP's driving opener on 1980's 'Chipmunk Punk.' To my ears, 'You May Be Right' sits at the precise midpoint between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones — a testament to Joel's absorptive powers and his stylistic aim. 'You can speak your mind but not on my time' probably isn't the sickest burn in Joel's catalog. But enlisting Peter Cetera to trill sweetly behind him as he sneers is A+ record-making. Mr. New York's signature song documents the six months he spent entertaining the patrons — the real estate novelist, Davy in the Navy, the old man sipping tonic and gin — of L.A.'s long-shuttered Executive Room near the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue. (His handsome pay, as he told me in 2017: 'I got tips and made union scale.') Joel's first single to chart on the Hot 100, 'Piano Man' can be hard to hear today as a work of detailed storytelling; that's what half a century of sloppy sing-alongs will do to a narrative. But then, of course, Joel has no one to blame for that but himself. Tell me you're not a wimp without telling me you're not a wimp. 'I'm probably the most proud of that album as a sonic work of art,' Joel says in the HBO doc of 'The Nylon Curtain,' on which he and Ramone deployed the whoosh and crunch of a steel mill to juice the beat of this Rust Belt threnody. Yet 'Allentown' also poses a pretty sophisticated critique of the social and political forces converging on a generation of Americans promised prosperity only to find a flag thrown in their face. With its head on fire and its eyes too bloody to see, 'Big Shot' imagines a morning-after quarrel between Mick and Bianca Jagger, Joel told Howard Stern, amid the excesses of what he described with disgust in Schruers' book as the 'coked-out, disco-drenched New York club scene' of the Studio 54 era. 'I shouldn't put it down, because I don't really know much about it,' he added. OK, Bill. Joel's most-streamed song on Spotify (with more than 1.2 billion plays) is an ouroboros of simpler-times nostalgia: a pitch-perfect Four Seasons rip that looks back at the early '60s from the early '80s — then became the longed-for totem at the heart of Olivia Rodrigo's 'Deja Vu.' 'It's the only song where I wrote the words first,' Joel said in 2017, 'which it sounds like, because the music sucks.' Demonstrably untrue — those timbales! Even if he were right, though, the rapid-fire historical roll call of 'We Didn't Start the Fire' deserves our respect as a crucial artifact of a pre-internet America. Your Wikipedia could never. The guy's asking for a lot: do this, don't do that; amuse me but not too much; listen to what I say instead of what I do (although sometimes I'll forget to say it too). But then there's that gently insistent groove and that pillowy electric piano. And that singing! Showy but intimate, talky yet supple, it's murmuring assurances to rebut the very doubts he's raising. Joel's first No. 1 offered him early proof that sometimes haters win. Think about the way Joel starts this song: 'Come out, Virginia, don't let me wait / You Catholic girls start much too late / But sooner or later it comes down to fate / I might as well be the one.' Two opposing worldviews colliding in four little lines against music trembling with the shared sense of anticipation that unites both the narrator and Virginia. Pop gets no richer. What other Billy Joel song could top a list of Billy Joel songs? 'Movin' Out' wants us to believe that success is for suckers, which is somehow a credo he's continued to sell — and we've continued to buy — through his ascent to the uppermost reaches of pop culture. These days Joel isn't Anthony or Mama Leone or even Mr. Cacciatore — he's the big shot who owns the medical center, not to mention whatever else is available on Sullivan Street. Yet his glorious bridge-and-tunnel music — proud, wounded, defensive, ambitious — keeps asking: Is this all I get for my money?

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