Billy Joel: unearned contempt?

Really gives new meaning to the phrase: People who live in Glass Houses shoudn't throw stones.

Slate's Ron Rosenbaum writes, after listening to a multi-CD boxset of the Joel's greatest hits:

I think I've identified the qualities in B.J.'s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt's backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.

He likens the Joel to Holden Caulfield, the phony who condemns phonies and phoniness (and high school idol)... which, following his song-by-song analysis, actually rings quite true. Rosenbaum takes FOREVER to get there, and the rhetorical question answering comes much too late to be of any use to those angered by his criticism. But nevertheless, a fine takedown of an artist that I once detested, yet can now tolerate after years of New York Area Classic Rock Radio.

But his article somehow rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps it's the lack of humor? and the hyperbolic tone of some of the criticism, bordering on preachy screechiness:

He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. Joel's famous song "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me"? Please. It never was rock 'n' roll. Billy Joel's music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: "Mock-Rock."

Jeez, relax. He's still not as bad as the Dan. Or is he?