FEATURE:
Too Good to Be Forgotten: Tracks That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure
IN THIS PHOTO: Billy Joel boxing in NY in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Timothy White
Billy Joel – We Didn’t Start the Fire
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THIS is a feature…
IN THIS PHOTO: Billy Joel shot by Eugene Adebari in 1989
where I look at songs that have been overlooked or, for the most part, are seen as a bit of a guilty pleasure! Not only are there no such things in music, but I think a lot of songs were either panned when they were released, or people feel embarrassed about loving them now. There is no denying the genius of Billy Joel, but I have seen him listed as a ‘guilty pleasures artists’, and someone who has a few decent songs in the catalogue and others that are not quite so strong. I like We Didn’t Start the Fire, because Billy Joel manages to cover so much history, and he name-drops so many historical figures. Last year, the Los Angeles Times wrote a feature that asked where all the people mentioned in We Didn’t Start the Fire are. It is clear that the song has made an impact since its release:
“Whatever you think of the concept – and millennial audiences may certainly raise their eyebrows at the Baby Boomer rundown of the Luckiest Generation’s trials and tribulations – there’s no denying that ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ had the cultural impact of a meteor strike.
The rapid-fire vocals are second nature even to people who couldn’t pick their author out of a line up, and it’s hard to pick a stronger contender for the definitive Billy Joel song, despite a career packed with highlights.
Even while covering forty years of world history in a little over four minutes, by offering no commentary (save for whatever you choose to believe the ‘fire’ is – something we don’t find out until the last few frames) Joel manages to keep the song itself remarkably apolitical.
By contrast, the video is a fast-paced run down of the generational evolution of the American family, taking in the burning of flags, bras and draft papers as martial bliss gives way to medicated stress and anger, with Joel himself a be-shaded, background presence throughout”.
I love Billy Joel, but 1989 was not his most successful year. Storm Front was not reviewed that highly, and he followed that in 1993 with River of Dreams – another album that gained some mixed response. Some say that Joel’s last truly great album was 1983’s An Innocent Man, and his albums after that were in decline. His final studio album in 2001, Fantasies & Delusions, was a fitting farewell, but it is a shame that Joel is no longer recording music. I love a lot of Billy Joel’s later albums, and I think songs like We Didn’t Start the Fire are classics. Maybe the production is very 1980s, in the sense that it might not have dated that well, but I think the lyrics are really educational and informative, and Joel’s vocal is very committed!
Rarely talked about in the same breath as classics like Piano Man, and She’s Always a Woman, I think we need to reframe and reinvestigate We Didn’t Start the Fire. I think the fact that the song has been parodied a lot means that some distance themselves from it. This 2014 article from Entertainment Weekly discusses the division the song has created:
“At the time of its release, some found “We Didn’t Start the Fire” to be a poignant statement on the decay of the collective American morale. John McAlley at Rolling Stone, for example, wrote that Joel chronicled “the steady erosion of our national spirit since 1949—incidentally, the year of his birth.”
Of course, not everyone was thrilled with “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” A 1997 story in College Teaching points out that when Joel’s album was released, Columbia Records, in collaboration with Scholastic, Inc., distributed the song to 40,000 junior and senior high school classrooms, along with a taped talk from Joel—a self-professed history buff—titled “History Is a Living Thing.”
Teachers’ reactions were mixed.
Nevertheless, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” would go on to become both a Billboard No. 1 and an honorable mention on at least one list of the Worst Songs Ever, as well as an ever-springing fountain of inspiration for parodists and an occasional classroom resource for history teachers.
In 1994, after a performance at Oxford University, a woman—presumably an Oxford student—asked Joel whether he accidentally or intentionally chronicled the Cold War in “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Thankfully, someone captured the exchange on video; Joel’s sprawling response is a little less than illuminating on that particular subject, but he offers a few marvelously entertaining extra tidbits about the origins and the legacy of the hit song he “didn’t think was really that good to begin with”.
It is a shame that Billy Joel is not overly-fond of We Didn’t Start the Fire, because I think there is a lot of genuine affection for it, and the fact that he was tackling history and putting out this ambitious song in 1989 – a year where we saw so much change and progress – is to be commended. It was a very different track to what the public were used to hearing but, apart from the production, I think We Didn’t Start the Fire resonates still and it is much more than a guilty pleasure! I would rank We Didn’t Start the Fire among Billy Joel’s best, and I especially love the song’s video! One does not hear the song so much on the radio, and that is a real pity. We Didn’t Start the Fire is a lot better and more important than people give it credit for, and I would urge everyone to…
GIVE it a good spin.