Over the weekend I had a sudden hankering to listen to the songs popular during my pubescent youth (in the late 1970s-early 1980s). For no particular reason, a quaint mix of ELO and early Billy Joel caught my fancy, and I spent the better part of an hour wallowing shamefully in soft rock. Everything was going along swimmingly until I listened to Joel’s “Don’t Ask Me Why”.

I’d always previously enjoyed this song, despite having no clear idea of its meaning. Then my ear, for the first time, picked out The Flaw. In the last chorus before the instrumental bit, Joel sings “don’t axe me why”. I played it over and over again to make sure I hadn’t misheard it. I hadn’t. Now I can’t unhear it, and the song is ruined for me. It’s maddening, but I can’t help focusing on it. I remember a similar circumstance many years ago; I had a tape of Beethoven’s music, and, one night while listening to it through headphones, I heard a faint but unmistakeable coughing sound in the background of one of the pieces.

It was doubtless some penniless third-string cellist slowly dying of catarrh brought on by his miserable life, starving for his underappreciated art in a filthy, unheated garret, but, then as now, the recording was irrevocably marred; I am apparently powerless to resist zeroing in on such tiny sonic imperfections, forever scuppering my enjoyment of the arrangements. Curse my aurally retentive nature, but damn you, Billy Joel, for allowing this blemish to exist unchallenged all these years, robbing me in a trice not only of my current listening pleasure, but also all my retroactive appreciation of this defective artwork.