Throughout my childhood I have been listening (without understanding of course) to Billy Joel’s song ’We didn’t start the fire’. I have always loved this song for all the reasons that you usually love the song for. Today I thought I may as well try to understand the song, so the hunt for the lyrics began.
Before I could get to know the lyrics the story behind the song unfolded. Billy Joel wrote this song because he overheard a child say that he felt sorry for ’’older people’’ like Billy Joel because no ’’history’’ happened in their lifetime, that NOW (or the time the song was written) was going to be the world’s most historical time period. The comment got to Billy Joel so much that he sat down and wrote this to prove that his lifetime has been FULL of history. The song goes as
’’We Didn’t Start The Fire’’
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
Josef Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron
Dien Bien Phu and ’’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
And so on.... Now whatever sites that I have visited it appears that this song happens to be is an excellent education tool for teachers and students! It is an story of all the the major events of the 20th century! Each word, I tell you, has an history that has not affected the world at that time but also has the impact even today.
Like he mentions Harry Truman Well loved 33rd President of the United States (1945-1953). Made the decision to drop the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima & Nagasaki. ’’Give ’em hell Harry!’’ The 1949 Inauguration was the first to be nationally televised, and was estimated to have been viewed by 10 million Americans.
Joel also mentions the phrase ’’Children of Thalidomide.’’ This reference dates back to 1958 when the drug thalidomide came into use as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women. This so-called ’’miracle’’ drug was put into widespread use in Europe, South America, and Australia. The drug transformed from miracle to tragedy when its side effects became apparent. Children were born with horrid malformations, such as flipper-like appendages and mutated or missing internal organs.
you may check the site ..
https://lyricsfreak.com/j/joel-billy/72985.html for the lyrics and
https://rareexception.com/Garden/Eighties/Fire.php for the history and the meaning that it carries
’’We Didn’t Start the Fire’’ is a song about blame and about victims.
A song about problems brought on by a society’s lack of concern for the rights of their fellow man.
A song about a society’s cultural icons.
A song about a country, and the roles it and its people have played in world for the last 50 years.
Billy Joel wrote this song to remind his peers that yes there have been problems, but that they weren’t the cause. He wanted to tell a society’s younger generation that it’s okay to want to fix these problems, but no-one, especially those who did cause the problems, could expect them to fix them all in day; they weren’t the ones who struck the match, they weren’t the ones who started the fire...
All said and done. It is going to be difficult for me to dance in tune with this song....