"Goodnight Saigon," the turning point of Billy Joel's ambitious new album [The Nylon Curtain], may well be remembered as the ultimate pop-music epitaph to the Vietnam War. (p. 71)

While "Goodnight Saigon" is The Nylon Curtain's stunner, there are other songs in which Joel's blue-collar smarts, Broadway theatricality and rock attitude blend perfectly. "Allentown," his portrait of a crumbling Pennsylvania mining city in which the American dream has died hard, could be a scene from The Deer Hunter put to music. Like "Goodnight Saigon," its tune, language and singing are all brazenly direct. And that directness is presumably what the album title refers to. For in one way or another, the songs on this LP are concerned with the tearing away of protective emotional filters to reveal naked truths.

But for every starkly descriptive song like "Goodnight Saigon," there's another that teases with ambiguous images and aural finery...