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Billy Joel’s ‘Allentown’ Reprised In ‘Hangover II’

The Hangover Part 2 uses Billy Joel's Allentown in pivotal scene

Billy Joel's “Allentown,” the song that briefly put the Queen City on the lips of people nationwide in 1982, is getting the city another shot of attention for its use in a critical scene of the new movie “The Hangover, Part II.”

A profanely rewritten version of the song is included on the film's soundtrack on Warner Bros. records, and various versions of it on YouTube have gotten more than 300,000 views.

In the movie, which opened No. 1 at the box office last week, the main character, Stu, played by Ed Helms, sings the song to Alan (Zach Galifianakis) as they are riding on a boat in Thailand.

The song is a takeoff on Alan's name and lists, sometimes in graphic detail, the travails the group has gone through because of Alan. Here are sample lyrics to the new version of “Allentown.”

“We're living here in Allentown/And he's driven our lives into the ground. “When we woke up we were wasted and drunk/Phil got shot, we got beaten by a monk.”

Joel's “Allentown” was released on Joel's benchmark “Nylon Curtain” album, and was about coping with the demise of the American manufacturing industry. Joel also did a conceptual video that was popular on MTV.

Read more at The Morning Call website.