List Songs, Part Five - "We Didn't Start The Fire"

 

Rich here to bring my series about songs that are comprised of lists to a conclusion, this one featuring Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" (1989). Billy Joel gets a tough rap a lot of the time. He could be self-absorbed and overbearing and glib. But he was one of the best songwriters of the past 50 years, and when he addressed social issues, he was usually spot-on. 

 

In the late '80s, after nearly 10 years of Reagan conservatism, idealistic young people started marching in the streets again, protesting economic inequality, human rights abuses ignored by America, the ongoing AIDS crisis, the menace of nuclear energy, the injuries to the environment, and the ineffectuality of neoliberalism. 

Just like we Baby Boomer had done to our parents, the youth in the streets blamed our generation for the risks to the country and to the planet. A Baby Boomer himself, Billy didn't dispute the accusations but denied that our generation had "started the fire" -- that history of the previous 50 years was filled with both cool cultural highs as well as terrible and horrific lows, and that the fire had been burning for a long before the Baby Boomers came around.

 

Some might argue that REM was making a roughly similar point with "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," but their song wasn't as succinct a "List Song" as Joel's, which is a culturally and historically excellent list of post-World War II history:

BILLY JOEL - "We Didn't Start The Fire"