“Slow down you crazy child, you’re so ambitious for a juvenile, but then if you’re so smart, tell me why are you still so afraid?”
The first time I heard “Vienna” by Billy Joel, I was eighteen. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college, and I felt as though the entire break was centered around one thing: my impending heart surgery. I was not only stressed about the surgery itself, but frustrated at how slowly I had been pushing myself along, angry that this sickness had forced me to press pause on my life and all the things I wanted to accomplish and experience. It didn’t seem fair.
That night in particular, I was lying in bed, feeling a bit blue, scrolling though Tumblr (as one does when one is blue), when this song popped up on my dashboard. I normally scroll past people’s song recommendations, but for some reason I pressed play. And it was like I was being spoken to directly.
Of course, that’s how the song is intended. It’s in the second person. You can’t help but get pulled in. It’s also accessible — as many Billy Joel songs are. It’s not a song that requires you to spend hours thinking about the lyrics. It’s a simple message: slow down, it’s alright, you’re doing fine. And for that reason, it’s a song I come back to often. It’s my comfort song. My weighted blanket and mug of hot chocolate song.
In the year of our Lord, 2020, comfort is, of course, a hot commodity. So it only seems fitting that “Vienna” is having a bit of a moment. A resurgence, if you will. Perhaps even, dare I say, a renaissance (and I did, on Twitter).
And I’m certainly not the only one tweeting about “Vienna.” I direct your attention to the following tweets, my supporting evidence:
But wait, there’s more. TikTok is hopping on the Billy Joel train as well.
I think Beaniebabyarmadillo makes a great point. There’s a reason why “Vienna” is such a hit with Gen Z and Millenials. Our lives are stuck in limbo. In a TIME article called “How COVID-19 Will Shape the Class of 2020 For the Rest of Their Lives,” Charlotte Alter opens with: “They call it commencement because it’s supposed to be a new beginning.”
While the piece mostly explores the psychological and economic effects of graduating into a global pandemic, I was especially interested in its analysis of the Class of 2020 as its own microgeneration.
Even before COVID-19, the Class of 2020 came of age at a time of fear and uncertainty. Born largely in 1997 and 1998—among the oldest of Gen Z—the Class of 2020 were in day care and pre-kindergarten on 9/11. Their childhoods have been punctuated by school -shootings and catastrophic climate change. Their freshman year at college began with President Donald Trump’s election; their senior year ended with a paralyzing global health crisis. “We stepped into the world as it was starting to fall apart,” says Simone Williams, who graduated from Florida A&M University in an online commencement May 9. “It’s caused my generation to have a vastly different perspective than the people just a few years ahead of us or behind us.”
This “vastly different perspective” is why we are seeing the increasing popularity of the term “Zillennial” to characterize young people between the ages of approximately 21-25 (although there is debate about the exact parameters): those who linger in the lonely space between “adulting” millennials and internet savvy teen Gen Z’s.
I am one of these lonely drifters. I even belong to a Facebook group called “Born Zillennial.” In the words of the admins, we were “born sometime in the ‘90s and shaped by the early 2000s, we’re too young to be Millennials and too old to be Gen Z. We bridge the gap between the non-digital and digital-first…basically, we get the Best of Both Worlds.” While the page mainly focused on niche ads, toys, and TV shows from when we were kids in 2005, it also functions as something of a support group. After starting in late September this year, the group already boasts an impressive 110.8K members.
In Born Zillennial, my fellow 90s babies wax nostalgic for things like Hannah Montana, Amanda Bynes movies, and Webkinz on Facebook, a website growing more and more irrelevant to young generations. However, while TikTok is mainly Gen Z’s terrain, there is also an increasing number of the older tier of Gen Z running to the app to escape from the doom and gloom of lockdown and unemployment — and to find community among others their age going through the same thing. We are a generation outside of the experiences shared by other generations, jumping from platform to platform, none of them feeling like quite the right fit (except for Tumblr, which lives in our minds rent-free, even as our Superwholock blogs are long forgotten in the cob-webbed attics of the interweb).
Perhaps it is the unique, nomadic quality of the Zillennial experience that lends itself to adopting the cultural artifacts of previous generations. We wear thrifted clothes from the 80s and 90s. We buy vinyl records that we may or may not have an actual player for. We add Fleetwood Mac and the Beatles on our playlists. And of course, we cry to “Vienna” by Billy Joel.
One of my mutuals on Twitter pointed out to me that the BJ renaissance may be a result of the Ryan Murphy Netflix show, The Politician, in which Ben Platt’s character performs a moving rendition of “Vienna” at a lounge bar in NYC. I have to confess I didn’t think of this, but it makes sense. Other possible reasons for its sudden surge include the Billy Joel Glee episode in season 5, 13 Going on 30, or maybe just their parents playing Billy Joel’s greatest hits album on long car rides, as one TikTok user shared.
Regardless, I’m grateful that “Vienna” is having its day in the sun.
Thanks for reading! I apologize for the slight delay this week — thank you so much for your patience. I may add a part two to this article at a later date, as I’d like to take a deeper dive into the songs of the past that are having a resurgence on TikTok resulting in an increase of streams. So let me know if that’s something you’d be into reading!
Have a lovely rest of your day/week!
<3 Jen