[Unless] you consider [Glass Houses] one bland and endless bad joke—as I do—there aren't any real howlers. Just fake this and fake that. (p. 51)

What's most annoying about Joel is his holier-than-thou sneakiness, his insistence to have it both ways. In "You May Be Right," the singer strikes one of the silliest tough-guy poses ever …, in general behaves like a perfect asshole, blames his girl for his actions when she points out that he's nuts, and then sums up everything with the logic of an egomaniac….

I guess what Joel's trying to do here is picture himself as a lovable loony, a teddy bear with a zip gun, but this brand of madness is snug enough—and smug enough—to make someone like Art Garfunkel look like Iggy Pop….

[It's] obvious that this Long Islander regards rock & roll as a braggart's game in which the blowzy, blustering good guy—i.e. himself—can lord it over everybody else and crow to his heart's content without taking any responsibility for his actions. Real kid stuff. The spoiled-brat special.

Billy Joel loves to play the bully. He's always laying down terms, drawing lines in the dirt that he dares you to cross. Especially if you're a woman:… ["It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" is] the L.P.'s two-pronged philosophical bummer. On one level, the song depicts a battle of the sexes; on another, it's about rock & roll. "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" is structured as a give-and-take dialogue in which the woman talks back in a futile attempt to get the man to shape up. The singer resists, of course, and tries to paint his female friend as a flighty harpy. In Joel's eyes, his reluctance makes him a no-bullshit hero, yet this grandstand play for independence is just another way to put down what he can't be part of and to give himself a pat on the back while he's doing it.

If that sounds like a contortionist's trick, so does the whole album. Glass Houses was apparently intended to be loose, raucous and less "well made" than its slick predecessors, but it comes out sounding twisted and confused. In "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me," Billy Joel's so screwed up that he sees himself championing good old rock & roll against what he considers the newfangled fads….

Maybe Joel just ought to 'fess up, forget about being a rock & roller and settle down in the middle of the road…. [What] many of his defenders say is true; his material's catchy. But then, so's the flu. (p. 52)