moving out

     

"Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" is a hit song written an recorded by Billy Joel. The track details the singer's disgust with the upwardly-mobile bourgeois aspirations of working and lower-middle class New Yorkers who take pride at working long hours in order to afford the outward signs of having "made it". Named characters have stereotypically immigrant or first-generation American names (Anthony, Mama Leone, Sergeant O'Leary) and their jobs are blue-collar. Joel considers their rejection of their working-class roots (trading a Chevy for a Cadillac and buying a house in Hackensack) to be ultimately futile; In the end, the rewards are a "heart attack" or "a broken back" (c.f. Joel's portrayal of himself in "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant").

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