We Didn't Start the Fire


"We Didn't Start the Fire" is a list song by American musician Billy Joel. Its lyrics include brief, rapid-fire allusions to more than 100 headline events between 1949, the year of Joel's birth, and 1989, when the song was released on his album Storm Front. The song was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. The song was also a No. 1 hit in the United States in late 1989.

History

Joel got 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 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 also criticized the song on strictly musical grounds. 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."
When asked if he deliberately intended to chronicle the Cold War with his song he responded, "It was just my luck that the Soviet Union decided to close down shop ", 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, he commented "No, I wrote one song already and I don't think it was really that good to begin with, melodically."

Music video

A music video for the single was directed by Chris Bloum. 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 of children, their growth, and later, grandchildren, and the eventual passing 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.

Historical events referred to in the song

Though the lyrics are rapid-fire with several people and events mentioned in a single word each, there is widespread agreement on the meaning of the lyrics. Steven Ettinger wrote,
The following events are listed in the order that they appear in the song, which is almost entirely chronological. The lyric for each individual event is brief and the events are punctuated by the chorus and other lyrical elements. The following list includes longer, more descriptive names for clarity. Events from a variety of contexts — such as popular entertainment, foreign affairs, and sports — are intermingled, giving an impression of the culture of the time as a whole. There are 118 events listed in the song.

1940s

1949

1950

1960

1972–1975

1981

Many parodies and takeoffs have been based on the song that pop culture commentary wiki TV Tropes deems such parodies a trope it calls "We Didn't Start the Billy Joel Parodies". These parodies include The Simpsons parody "They'll Never Stop the Simpsons" at the end of the 2002 "Gump Roast" episode, and the San Francisco a cappella group The Richter Scales' 2007 Webby Award-winning parody "Here Comes Another Bubble." The Cayuga's Waiters, a former a cappella group at Cornell University, previously performed a version entitled "We Didn't Go to Harvard" with constantly changing lyrics to reflect the changing Cornell experience but always mentioning various Cornell and Ithaca landmarks. The band Guns 'n' Moses made a parody of the song called "We Love Barney Fife" that was played frequently on the Doctor Demento radio show, which not only paid tribute to The Andy Griffith Show, it also took advantage of the melody of the refrain being a suitable counterpoint for the Andy Griffith Show theme. The song was also parodied on the episode of the U.S. version of The Office where Ryan Howard starts a fire in the office building, and Dwight and Michael change the lyrics of the song to "Ryan Started The Fire". On a 2017 episode of The Goldbergs, Barry rehearses the song for his talent show, but manages to mess up the lyrics; eventually, when he performs it at the talent show, he adapts new lyrics to the song referencing his high school experiences, which is very well received.
In 1993, Paramount Pictures used a derivative of the song, called "We Didn't Start the Series" to advertise
'. The performers of the song are unknown.
Another parody was released in 2010 titled "The Wii Didn't Start the Fire" about the history of video games. "We Didn't Start the Fire" was also used in the American comedy series
Parks and Recreation in the seventh season episode, "Leslie and Ron", in which Leslie attempts to sing the song in order to get Ron to confess about why he left the parks department.
In 2006, Coca-Cola sampled the song in order to make an anthem for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Latin America, changing the lyrics according to the country.
JibJab set their 2007 year in review song to "We Didn't Start the Fire"'s tune. In early 2009, comedy website CollegeHumor created a parody entitled "We Didn't Start the Flame War" which chronicles a long list of common inflammatory comments left on content over a wide variety of popular websites by internet trolls.
In 1993, Lenny Solomon and Shlock Rock created a parody entitled "We've Got a Strong Desire", which contains over 5000 years of Jewish history sung in 4 minutes. In the Netherlands the Dutch punk rock band Heideroosjes did a parody on their 20-year anniversary album about things that happened over those twenty years in the Netherlands called "De Wereld Draait Door". German comedian Otto Waalkes did a parody called "Wir haben Grund zum Feiern", with a list of alcoholic beverages.
An edition of the BBC Three comedy programme
Russell Howard's Good News featured a parody of the song detailing numerous items that the Daily Mail newspaper said caused cancer.
Fans of
Homestuck uploaded a version of the song called "You Can't Fight the Homestuck", created by Meme Queen Kylee Henke, on YouTube in 2012, chronicling the webcomic's long and convoluted story. YouTuber Daneboe/Dane Boedigheimer, known as 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." In a 2013 episode of Family Guy, after Peter's plane goes down, he asks his friends if there might be a hint on how to start a fire in the song. He proceeds to sing the song but has forgotten almost all of the words and mumbles through it.
Pop band Milo Greene performed a version of the song in June 2013 for
The A.V. Club A.V. Undercover series. In 2015, Sky Sports released their own version of the song to advertise the upcoming 2015 Ashes series, with backing vocals and percussion provided by Elio Pace and his band. Pace has toured and recorded with Joel's original touring band.
In the 2012 comedy film
The Five-Year Engagement, during Tom and Violet's engagement party, Alex sings a version of the song including all of Tom's previous girlfriends and one night stands.
In 2014, Neil Cicierega released a mashup album,
Mouth Silence. The 17th song, "Space Monkey Mafia", plays lyrics from "We Didn't Start The Fire" and R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It " on top of each other, modifying the lyrics of both songs so they sync up, and putting them over an original polka melody.
Since the 2015–16 season, YouTuber Jim Daly created a song of each season's 92 clubs in the Premier League and English Football League to the tune of We Didn't Start The Fire, with the chorus 'Lots of teams in English football, from the Premier League down to those teams in League Two, lots of teams in English football, I'm gonna try to make it through the whole 92'.
In 2019, on
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the cast of the film made a parody of the song that depicted the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe as well as several characters appearing in the film and from the Marvel comic books. Also, professional wrestling-focused YouTube channel, Cultaholic, debuted a series called What Happened to That Wrestler?'' in which the theme song is a parody of the song. Cultaholic later went on to release a full parody video.

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

All-time charts

Certifications

Personnel