Song of the Day 5/23: Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”

This song must be having a moment. I heard it three times on the radio, on three different stations, in the past two weeks, and even though it’s one of Billy Joel’s last hits, it’s really old. It was a No. 1 single all the way back in 1989, so I was surprised when I heard my 9-year-old grandson singing it the other day. Then I realized he was singing one of the countless parodies created over the years that he heard on TikTok.

“We Didn’t Start the Fire” is one of those widely hated songs that nevertheless reaches the top of the charts. Critics snorted that Joel had merely set the contents of an encyclopedia’s Book of the Year supplements to music — Blender said it sounded like “a term paper scribbled the night before it’s due” — and they weren’t far off. Joel said he wrote it after some young twenty-something told him “everybody knows nothing happened in the ’50s.”

He’s under no illusions about its place in his catalog, either. “It’s really not much of a song,” he once told a filmmaker. “If you take the melody by itself, terrible. Like a dentist drill.” The song mentions 118 events — someone compiled the list, of course — starting in 1949, the year Joel was born, and ending in 1989.

Within a few years people were asking him if he’d update it with more current events. He responded, “No, I wrote one song already and I don’t think it was really that good to begin with, melodically.” No matter, a thousand YouTubers have stepped into the breach.