We Didn't Start The Fire

What exactly is this fire anyway? Was it really caused in part by The King and I, Hoola Hoops, and Brooklyn having a winning team?

I always sort of wondered about this.

Yeah, I mean, if the premise of the song is "boomers weren't the first to fuck up the world, it goes back at least as far as Harry Truman" I guess I get that... but as my friend put it, "Why would you try to fight Chubby Checker?"

You know, the sound of the syllables is really great on this, and it could be a genuinely cool song if Joel had stuck closer to the premise: not saying we Boomers are any great shakes, but just to be clear, we got all rebellious because the world as delivered to us was already fucked up, divided and violent. Not a Forrest Gump "journey through the postwar decades!" history, but a preemptive strike against easy "Greatest Generation" valorization of the graying technocrats, warmongers and consumerist policymakers that set the terms of the postwar struggles and were still hanging around in positions of real power. It gets totally garbled up by including all these boomer-era pros and cons and/or pleasant bequests from older generations (is Buddy Holly really so destructive? Toscanini?), but then, it'd be hard to purge some of those rhymes once they'd made it in.

Easily one of the greatest songs of all time

How many people in 2014 remember (or ever knew) who Bernie Goetz is?

I do, but only thanks to that one Doonesbury storyline where Mike blunders into a media circus after a subway altercation.

http://i.imgur.com/qf0vb6S.jpg

Yesssss.....

https://twitter.com/BillyJoel_Bot

Even better because I found it by combing through my work twitter's RT's.

lol at yr previous revive

ILX Phrases That Stick In Your Mind

shit is this *chronological*? i had no idea.

It jumps back and forth a few years here and there, and sometimes confuses by invoking somebody's death date, but yeah.

ha clarity. that's why i never noticed.

just spent 20 minutes looking up Bernie Goetz. still no idea if he 'did it' or not.

Now there's a fun afternoon project: Rearrange the lyrics, but keep the beat and rhyme.

Harry Mantle, Stalin X, Mafia, Chubby Goetz
Hula bomb, Moonstock, British Beatle monkey sex

BELGIANS IN THALIDOMIDE

"'Britney Spears' waffles" search yielded no worthwhile results, very surprised by this.

Did find this though.

http://i.imgur.com/E3KGBoX.jpg

how could you not realize this was chronological?

@we_didnt_start

I spent way too many years wondering who the 'Children of the Little Mind' were (see also 'Bacon Regan').

lol, "Children of the Little Mind" is SO close to being the title of a 1965-era Serious Adult Nonfiction Publication that became synonymous with an era/concern/issue, and thus got namechecked in "We Didn't Start The Fire."

Old Mist Junglin'
TROUBLE IN THE SEWERS

my childhood spoof (warning: very funny!)

Superman and Lois Lane
Spider-Man and Mary Jane
Harry, Larry, Barry, Gary
Jerry, Cary, Billy Zane

and the only other part I still remember:

Nair, achy breaky hair, mullet, the electric chair

It’s been long enough that someone could do a “Millennial” version/update, starting where the original left off.

(Note: I am not actually advocating this idea)

a couple days before i faked speaking in tongues, a man in a sport coat stood in front of me and hundreds of other young teens and played a parody/cover of this song titled "we're gonna read the bible"

god i fucking hate this song

Boy, now that would be a hard one.

Sons of Simeon, Jemuel, and Jamin,
Ephraim and Manasseh
Ahisamach, Aholiab
Shelumiel, the son of Zurishaddai

My friend just saw him on a lark at MSG and live-streamed (so to speak) the walk from his seat to the bathroom when Billy started this song.

It was always burnin', sister.
World's been turnin'.

took me a minute to realise msg didn't refer to monosodium glutamate there

or did it

a couple days before i faked speaking in tongues, a man in a sport coat stood in front of me and hundreds of other young teens and played a parody/cover of this song titled "we're gonna read the bible"

karl i'm so sorry

There are also things in the song that I heard correctly but contextualized incorrectly, such as 'Chubby Checker (Psycho)' (suggesting that Chubby had severe mental instability) and 'Hula Hoops Castro' (presumably the daughter of Fidel).

'non sequitur list of things set to unengaging music' is a severely underutilized songwriting form imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rsmq4oJaiM

'non sequitur list of things set to unengaging music' is a severely underutilized songwriting form imo.

― Not with a bang but a MAGA (Old Lunch)

not by roger waters!

Hyperloop
Fash bro
Incel is a no go

no votes for leonard bernstein, leonid brezhnev, lenny bruce and lester bangs, hmm.

hear me out. what if .. we did start the fire?

or it pretty much went out and we re-started it

i wish this song were called "Moments in Time"

What if this had been one of those songs like "The Horse" by Cliff Nobles where the instrumental was more famous than the side with the lyrics.

People would hear it at a football game and go, "Ever hear the version with the lyrics? It's really weird."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g04jLd1b_mo

I know like a thousand times more about the history and culture of the 20th Century than I did when this song came out and I still don't understand like a quarter (maybe even a third) of these lyrics.

THANK YOU. Its so wild that "cola wars" is what makes Billy Joel upend that table in the music video https://t.co/6kKkPQxq1w

— 🍓 Camellia-Berry Grass 🍓 (@theCBGrass) June 18, 2021

I’m sure he wrote it that way on purpose – it ends the rant on a note of irony/satire. Try ending it with a different line (e.g., “Hypodermics on the shore”); it sort of falls flat.

lol, i can remember some talking head on "I Love The 80s" making basically the same observation back in 2002. but maybe this points the way towards the best way of sequelizing/updating WDSTF: start with rock-n-roller cola wars, and go up to "I Love the 80s."

Betty Crocker
Ministry
At Toys 'R' Us, a shopping spree
Nipsy Russell
Mr. Whipple
Tootsie Roll Pop
Spaceballs
Madballs
Hot Sam's in every shopping mall
Daisy Fuentes
Crazytown
Gino Vanelli wants to stop

Can anyone tell me what Prokofiev did to be included in this litany of touchstones?