We Didn't Start the Fire

"We Didn't Start the Fire" is a song by Billy Joel. Its lyrics include brief, rapid-fire allusions to more than 100 headline events between January 1949 (Joel was born on May 9 of that year) and 1989, when the song was released on his album Storm Front. The song was a No. 1 hit in the US. It peaked at #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 Chart in the Autumn of 1989. Joel got the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a friend of Sean Lennon who had just turned 21 who said "It's a terrible time to be 21!" Joel replied to him, "Yeah, I remember when I was 21 -- I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y'know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful." The friend replied, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties". Joel retorted, "Wait a minute, didn't you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?" Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song. Joel has said, "I'm a history nut. I devour books. At one time I wanted to be a history teacher". According to his mother, he was a bookworm by the age of seven. Unlike most of Joel's songs, the lyrics were written before the melody, owing to the somewhat unusual style of the song. The song was a huge commercial success and was Joel's third Billboard No. 1 hit. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. I had turned forty. It was 1989 and I said "Okay, what's happened in my life?" I wrote down the year 1949. Okay, Harry Truman was president. Popular singer of the day, Doris Day. China went Communist. Another popular singer, Johnnie Ray. Big Broadway show, South Pacific. Journalist, Walter Winchell. Athlete, Joe DiMaggio. Then I went on to 1950 [...]. It's one of the worst melodies I've ever written. I kind of like the lyric though. Joel has said, "There's an element of malevolence in the song"; it's like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Joel has mixed feelings about the song. "It's a nightmare to perform live, because if I miss one word, it's a train wreck." He has also called it a "novelty song" that does not "really define me as well as album songs that probably don't get played". On being asked if he could do a follow-up about the next couple of years after the events that transpired in the original song, he commented "No, I wrote one song already and I don't think it was really that good to begin with, melodically." Blender magazine ranked "We Didn't Start the Fire" No. 41 on its list of the "50 Worst Songs Ever", a list that also includes songs from Paul McCartney and Simon & Garfunkel. They considered the production bombastic and stated that the song "resembles a term paper scribbled the night before it’s due."

[Verse 1] Harry Truman, Doris Day Red China, Johnnie Ray South Pacific Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon Studebaker, Television North Korea, South Korea Marilyn Monroe Rosenbergs, H-Bomb Sugar Ray, Panmunjom Brando, The King And I, And The Catcher In The Rye Eisenhower, Vaccine England's got a new queen Marciano, Liberace Santayana goodbye [Chorus] We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it [Verse 2] Joseph Stalin, Malenkov Nasser and Prokofiev Rockefeller, Campanella Communist Bloc Roy Cohn, Juan Peron Toscanini, Dacron Dien Bien Phu Falls, "Rock Around the Clock" Einstein, James Dean Brooklyn's got a winning team Davy Crockett, Peter Pan Elvis Presley, Disneyland Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev Princess Grace, Peyton Place Trouble in the Suez [Chorus] We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it [Verse 3] Little Rock, Pasternak Mickey Mantle, Kerouac Sputnik, Zhou En-lai Bridge On The River Kwai Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle California baseball Starkweather Homicide Children of Thalidomide Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur Space Monkey, Mafia Hula Hoops, Castro Edsel is a no-go U-2, Syngman Rhee Payola and Kennedy Chubby Checker, Psycho Belgians in the Congo [Chorus] We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it [Verse 4] Hemingway, Eichmann Stranger in a Strange Land Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania Ole Miss, John Glenn Liston beats Patterson Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician sex J.F.K. blown away What else do I have to say? [Chorus] We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it [Verse 5] Birth control, Ho Chi Minh Richard Nixon back again Moonshot, Woodstock Watergate, punk rock Begin, Reagan, Palestine Terror on the airline Ayatollahs in Iran Russians in Afghanistan Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride Heavy metal suicide Foreign debts, homeless Vets AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz Hypodermics on the shores China's under martial law Rock and Roller cola wars I can't take it anymore [Chorus] We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire But when we are gone It will still burn on, and on And on, and on [Outro] We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning