"We Didn't Start the Fire" is a song written by American musician Billy Joel. The song was released as a single on September 18, 1989, and later released as part of Joel's album Storm Front on October 17, 1989. A list song, its fast-paced lyrics include a series of brief references to 119[3] significant political, cultural, scientific, and sporting events between 1949 (the year of Joel's birth) and 1989, in mainly chronological order.
The song was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and, in late 1989, became Joel's third single to reach number one in the United States Billboard Hot 100. Storm Front became Joel's third album to reach number one in the US. "We Didn't Start the Fire", particularly in the 21st century, has become the basis of many pop culture parodies, and continues to be repurposed in various television shows, advertisements, and comedic productions. Despite its early success, Joel later noted his dislike of the song musically, and it was critically panned as one of his worst by later generations of music critics.
History
Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said "It's a terrible time to be 21!". Joel replied: "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.[4]
Joel later criticized the song on strictly musical grounds.[5][6][7] In 1993, when discussing it with documentary filmmaker David Horn, Joel compared its melodic content unfavorably to his song "The Longest Time": "Take a song like 'We Didn't Start the Fire'. It's really not much of a song ... If you take the melody by itself, terrible. Like a dentist drill."[5]
When asked if he deliberately intended to chronicle the Cold War with his song[8] he responded: "It was just my luck that the Soviet Uniondecided to close down shop [soon after putting out the song]", and that this span "had a symmetry to it, it was 40 years" that he had lived through. He was asked if he could do a follow-up about the next couple of years after the events that transpired in the original song, and he commented: "No, I wrote one song already and I don't think it was really that good to begin with, melodically".[6]
Critical reception
Upon its release, "We Didn't Start the Fire" was met with a mixed response. David Giles from Music Week wrote, "Promising return which finds Joel in rockier mood with a very wordy song cramming in references to virtually every major figure and event in the twentieth century. After all that, the message of the lyrics is foggy and confused, but this should certainly see him back in the charts."[9]
Though the lyrics are rapid-fire with several people and events mentioned in each stanza, there is widespread agreement on the meaning of the lyrics. Steven Ettinger wrote:
Billy Joel captured the major images, events, and personalities of this half-century in a three-minute song... It was pure information overload, a song that assumed we knew exactly what he was singing about...What was truly alarming was the realization that we, the listeners, for the most part understood the references.[10]
After a cover by Fall Out Boy was released in 2023 to negative critical reception, the song was once again brought to the forefront, and modern critics panned even the original song as one of Joel's worst in his entire catalog.[11][12][13]
A music video for the song was directed by Chris Blum.[14] The video begins with a newly married couple entering their 1940s-style kitchen, and shows events in their domestic life over the next four decades, including the addition and growth of their children and grandchildren, the 1950s housewife burning dinner, a distraught 1960s housewife whose disinterested husband and children won't eat her cooking popping pills, the hippie counterculture children burning their bras and draft cards while smoking marijuana in the kitchen, and the eventual death of the family's father. The passage of time is also depicted by periodic redecoration and upgrades of the kitchen, while an unchanging Billy Joel looks on in the background. Joel is also shown banging on a table in front of a burning backdrop depicting various images that include the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém and the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, among others.
Derivations
Many parodies and takeoffs have been based on the song (often expanding to events that have occurred since 1989). These parodies include The Simpsons' parody "They'll Never Stop the Simpsons" at the end of the 2002 "Gump Roast" episode,[15] and the San Francisco a cappella group The Richter Scales' 2007 Webby Award-winning parody "Here Comes Another Bubble".[16]
On May 17, 1990, the Irish rock band the Memories reached number one on the Irish Singles Chart with their version of the song entitled "The Game (Italia '90)" which celebrated Republic of Ireland's qualification for the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy.[17] Billy Joel partially covered the Memories version when he performed in Dublin.
In 2007, JibJab released an installment of their then-annual "Year in Review" videos, which was set to the tune of "We Didn't Start the Fire".
YouTuberDane Boedigheimer, known as the creator of the popular comedic web series Annoying Orange, produced a parody as part of YouTube's Comedy Week in 2013 titled "We Didn't Start the Viral", although the video's audio was later replaced for copyright infringement despite being considered fair use as a work of parody.[20]
Pop band Milo Greene performed a version of the song in June 2013 for The A.V. Club's A.V. Undercover series.[21]
On June 28, 2023, Fall Out Boy released their own version of the song with updated lyrics that references events that happened from 1989 to 2023. Unlike Joel's original, Fall Out Boy's version did not list events in chronological order. On September 12, 2023, the band performed it at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards.[23] The song was widely panned by fans and critics,[24] especially for its lack of chronological sequencing present in Joel's original and its omission of some events and people, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic. Fall Out Boy bassist and lead songwriter, Pete Wentz, said in an interview regarding the exclusion, "It’s like, [COVID-19]'s all anybody talked…[sic] You know what I mean? I don’t know."[25]
^ Shipments figures based on certification alone. ‡ Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.
In popular culture
In 2021, a weekly podcast began, hosted by Katie Puckrik and Tom Fordyce, entitled We Didn't Start the Fire. Each week they examine a subject mentioned in the Billy Joel song, in lyric order, and discuss its importance and cultural significance with an expert guest.[59]
The song features prominently, along with a number of other Billy Joel songs, in the streaming series The Boys from Amazon Prime in which the character Hughie Campbell, played by Jack Quaid, has a preoccupation with the American singer.[60]
"19 Somethin'", a song covering the 1970s and 1980s
"25 Years of Rock" — A BBC radio series looking at each year from 1955 to 1979 that charted news stories, social and political events with a rock soundtrack.
The Rock 'n' Roll Years" — a BBC television series based on 25 Years of Rock but with a timespan from 1956 to 1989.
References
^"New Singles". Music Week. September 16, 1989. p. 36.
