Everyone thinks of Jimmy Stewart as a sanitized "oh gosh" icon of apple-pie Americana, but when you look at his body of work, there are a lot of disturbed characters in there. The voyeur and the sexually obsessive freak he played for Hitchcock are obvious examples, but even his George Bailey in that allegedly saccharine but actually coal-dark holiday classic It's a Wonderful life is scary and intense for most of the film.
Billy Joel may be the Jimmy Stewart of pop. He's the piano man who sings songs your Jagger-phobic mom thought were nice, but if you look closer at his body of work, there are a lot of disturbed characters in there, none of whom are ever more disturbed than the singer. Who's creepier: the pot-smoking, nose-picking, masturbating subject of "Captain Jack" or the curtain-twitching voyeur who sits in snide judgment of that kid's every move? Joel also does the Rear Window bit in other sneeringly judgmental tracks like "Movin' Out", "Big Shot", "Los Angelenos", and "Angry Young Man", on which he seems to be addressing a mirror. So the guy may have often sounded like McCartney on a particularly sunny Sunday, but a lot of Joel's work could go toe-to-toe with Elvis Costello's in terms of bitterness.
