Captain's Log

We Didn't Start the Fire

Hopefully you've heard the Billy Joel song We Didn't Start the Fire. If you haven't go find it and listen to it now!

The story goes the Billy Joel was talking to a disillusioned kid in the late 80s about how things were so bad in the world at the time. The kid said Joel was lucky to have grown up in the 50s, when not much happened. In response, Joel wrote this song. The lyrics are rapid fire allusions to political, cultural, and historical events between 1949 and 1989.

I thought about making a page describing the references, but there are a zillion of them already out there, so I just went looking for a good one. After dogding a bunch of sites with obnoxious colors schemes, I found this one. All the references are linked for your laziness.

(Edit: Removed the link because it was dead. There's a good page with links on Wikipedia.)

If you are feeling adventurous, you can watch a crazy flash representation of the song. It has pictures that pop up in sync with the references in the song. Once you get past the annoying text, subliminal messages, and crazy colors you might enjoy it.

My high school US History teacher, Coach Bryan, played the song in our class, and went over the references as a cultural review of the time period just before our AP exam. I'd heard it before, but hearing it in class gave it more meaning, and I had a chance to learn about all those significant events which led to the world that we live into today. All that in a #1 pop song...