"
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 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.
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.
Joel later 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 [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".
Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire
A music video for the song was directed by Chris Blum. 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.
