From our other sites
The story
A thread titled “Billy Joel’s Ultimate Song” on the Hello! Project board had fans rattling off classics like Piano Man and We Didn’t Start the Fire one after another. The discussion even touched on how the Japanese hit “Ai wa Katsu” (Love Will Win) was inspired by Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” and how the Up-Front group of labels — Hello! Project included — covered it in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake, sparking excitement over this unexpected link between Western music and Hello! Project.
What people said
Maybe Just the Way You Are is better.
We Didn't Start the Fire
This Night
But he announced a tour cancellation last year due to illness.
Lol, "consciously"?
It's so blatant you can tell it's Billy Joel the instant you hear Ai wa Katsu.
Wasn't it Morning Musume up through the 9th generation that just barely made the cut to join in?
Even Billy Joel ends up tying back to Hello! Project.
That's wild.
If just echoing someone's style counts as a "connection," then anything goes.
Hoshibe (a Hello! Project songwriter) will hook you up with connections like that all day.
I read somewhere that he's a genius, but his early work was so good he struggled to ever top himself.
Apparently he'd hit slumps because nothing he wrote could beat his early stuff.
My favorite Billy Joel song from the '90s
Source, please
Where'd you wander in from?
Anyway, take Kobushi Factory's song "Nen ni wa Nen" for starters
It's basically just T.Rex's "20th Century Boy" riff sped up.
And the call-and-response chorus in the verse is lifted straight from The Who's "My Generation."
You could probably find a whole list if you Google it.
Whoa, hold on, hold on.
This is about how "Ai wa Katsu" — the massive domestic hit born out of Billy Joel's worldwide smash "Uptown Girl" — got renewed attention when the whole Up-Front stable, Hello! Project included, covered it after the Great East Japan Earthquake.
And here you are countering with some obscure song Hoshibe wrote for some random group? I'm honestly amazed you'd even bring that up.
I love Innocent Man
It used to play all the time at boys' bars (host clubs).
That's the UK's "Piano Man" (i.e., Elton John), not Billy Joel
So it only counts as a connection if it was a hit?
What about Love Machine's "Venus," Happy Summer Wedding's "Donna Summer," or "Genghis Khan"?
Or does Misora Hibari's "Omatsuri Mambo" not count as a hit either?
Starship?
Background and Key Points
Billy Joel is one of the best-selling artists in US history, with 33 Top 40 hits and a run of 1970s-80s albums (The Stranger, 52nd Street, An Innocent Man) that remain fixtures on Japanese TV and radio through commercial tie-ins — several posters trace their own first exposure to a Honda scooter ad. He turned 77 this year but canceled touring in 2024 after a diagnosed brain disorder, which is why one poster referenced his health rather than new music. The Hello! Project connection is specific and real: “Ai wa Katsu (Love Will Win),” a charity single covered by Up-Front Works artists including Morning Musume after the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, borrows its melodic hook from Joel’s 1983 hit “Uptown Girl.” That’s a genuine, acknowledged musical lineage, not a stretch.
Where the thread actually splits is less about which song is “best” than about how legitimate that Hello! Project link is. One poster frames “Ai wa Katsu” as a clear, deliberate homage; another pushes back that this kind of “it’s basically the same riff” claim is so loose it could tie almost any Western song to Hello! Project, citing Kobushi Factory’s borrowings from T.Rex and The Who as an equally “valid” but absurd comparison.
What outside readers will likely miss is that the Joel-to-J-pop pipeline runs deeper than one cover: Hoshibe, a longtime Hello! Project songwriter, has a reputation among fans for lifting hooks and structures from Western classic rock across multiple idol tracks, which is why the “connection” claim reads to some posters as an in-joke about a known pattern rather than a one-off discovery.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “Billy Joel’s Ultimate Song.”
Leave a Reply