"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. In a 1993 interview, Joel compared the song to "a dentist drill" and called it "a terrible piece of music". It has been critically panned as one of his worst by later generations of music critics.
Contents
History
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." It is also the only song in Joel's discography where he wrote the lyrics before the music.
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".
Critical reception
Upon its release, "We Didn't Start the Fire" was met with a mixed response. David Giles from Music Week wrote, "Promising return which finds Joel in rockier mood with a very wordy song cramming in references to virtually every major figure and event in the twentieth century. After all that, the message of the lyrics is foggy and confused, but this should certainly see him back in the charts."
Though the lyrics are rapid-fire with several people and events mentioned in each stanza, there is widespread agreement on the meaning of the lyrics. Steven Ettinger wrote:
Billy Joel captured the major images, events, and personalities of this half-century in a three-minute song ... It was pure information overload, a song that assumed we knew exactly what he was singing about ... What was truly alarming was the realization that we, the listeners, for the most part understood the references.
After a cover by Fall Out Boy was released in 2023 to negative critical reception, the song was once again brought to the forefront, and modern critics panned even the original song as one of Joel's worst in his entire catalog.
In June 2026, CBS News included the song in its list of the 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years.
Music video
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.
Derivations
Many parodies and takeoffs have been based on the song (often expanding to events that have occurred since 1989). These parodies include The Simpsons' parody "They'll Never Stop the Simpsons" at the end of the 2002 "Gump Roast" episode, and the San Francisco a cappella group The Richter Scales' 2007 Webby Award-winning parody "Here Comes Another Bubble".
On May 17, 1990, the Irish rock band the Memories reached number one on the Irish Singles Chart with their version of the song entitled "The Game (Italia '90)" which celebrated Republic of Ireland's qualification for the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. Billy Joel partially covered the Memories version when he performed in Dublin.
In 2004, Boris Novković and Dino Dvornik released a song "Malo Nas Je, Al' Nas Ima" ("We Are Few, But We Exist"), listing Croatian VIPs and events.
In 2006, Coca-Cola sampled the song to make a Latin American anthem for the German 2006 FIFA World Cup. The lyrics were changed for each country.
In 2007, JibJab released an installment of their then-annual "Year in Review" videos, which was set to the tune of "We Didn't Start the Fire".
In 2012, the political-satire music group Capitol Steps released "We Didn't Start Satire", a review of 30 years of political events and scandals.
In 2013, YouTuber Dane Boedigheimer, known as the creator of the popular comedic web series Annoying Orange, produced a parody as part of YouTube's Comedy Week titled "We Didn't Start the Viral", although the video's audio was later replaced for copyright infringement despite being considered fair use as a work of parody.
In June 2013, pop band Milo Greene performed a version of the song for The A.V. Club's A.V. Undercover series.
Since the 2015–16 season, YouTuber Jim Daly produced a parody of this song at the start of every English football season, outlining all 92 clubs in the Premier League and English Football League of each season. There are notable lines such as those about the Bristol derby (e.g. "Bristol City, Bristol Rovers, They will never like each other" from the 2026–27 version), "What's the point of Crawley", lines questioning "Alexandra" from Crewe Alexandra's name, "Where the hell is Fleetwood", "Do not call the Forest Notts" for Notts County, and saying that Tinie Tempah hasn't seen Scunthorpe United.
Personnel
Billy Joel – vocals, clavinet, percussion
Liberty DeVitto – drums, percussion
David Brown – lead guitar
Joey Hunting – rhythm guitar
Crystal Taliefero – backing vocals, percussion
Schuyler Deale – bass guitar
John Mahoney – keyboards
Sammy Merendino – electronic percussion
Kevin Jones – keyboard programming
Doug Kleeger – sounds effects and arrangements
In popular culture
In 2021, a weekly podcast began, hosted by Katie Puckrik and Tom Fordyce, entitled We Didn't Start the Fire. Each week they examine a subject mentioned in the Billy Joel song, in lyric order, and discuss its importance and cultural significance with an expert guest.
The song features prominently, along with a number of other Billy Joel songs, in the streaming series The Boys from Amazon Prime in which the character Hughie Campbell, played by Jack Quaid, has a preoccupation with the American singer.
The plot of the season 17 premiere of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, "The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary", involves the characters writing an updated version of "We Didn't Start the Fire", without being aware that Fall Out Boy did it first.
Events and people outlined
The following events and individual's names, with Joel's lyric for each appearing in bold, are listed in the order that they appear in the song, which is almost entirely chronological. The lyrics for each item are minimal, and the items are punctuated by the chorus and other lyrical elements. The following list includes longer, more descriptive names for clarity. Events and names from a variety of contexts – such as popular entertainment, foreign affairs, and sports – are intermingled, giving an impression of the culture of the time as a whole. There are 118 items listed in the song.
1940s
Harry Truman is inaugurated after he wins the 1948 United States presidential election following a partial term after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Doris Day releases her debut album You're My Thrill, and stars in two hit movies, My Dream is Yours and It's a Great Feeling.
Red China is established by the Chinese Communist Party, which wins the Chinese Civil War.
Johnnie Ray, a rock and roll progenitor, signs his first recording contract with Okeh Records.
South Pacific, the award-winning musical, opens on Broadway.
Walter Winchell, an influential radio and newspaper journalist, begins to denounce communism as the main threat facing America.
Joe DiMaggio signs a record-breaking $100,000 contract with the New York Yankees.
1950s
Joe McCarthy, a U.S. Senator, gains national attention and begins his anti-communism crusade with his Lincoln Day speech.
Richard Nixon is first elected to the United States Senate.
Studebaker, a popular automobile company, begins its financial downfall.
Television becomes widespread throughout Europe and North America.
North Korea invades South Korea, beginning the Korean War.
Marilyn Monroe appears in five films, including The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve.
The Rosenbergs, married couple Ethel and Julius, are convicted of espionage.
H-Bomb development begins in the United States.
Sugar Ray Robinson, a champion boxer, defeats Jake LaMotta in the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre".
Panmunjom, a border village in Korea, is the location of truce talks between the parties of the Korean War.
Marlon Brando is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in A Streetcar Named Desire.
The King and I, the musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, opens on Broadway.
The Catcher in the Rye, a controversial novel by J. D. Salinger, is published.
Dwight D. Eisenhower is the landslide winner of the 1952 United States presidential election.
1960s
A U-2 spy plane flown by American CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, causing the 1960 U-2 incident. It does not refer to the Irish rock band U2 which did not form until 1976.
Syngman Rhee is rescued by the CIA after being forced to resign as leader of South Korea.
Payola, illegal payments for radio broadcasting of songs, are publicized by Dick Clark's testimony before Congress and Alan Freed's public disgrace.
John F. Kennedy, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, beats Vice President Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election.
Chubby Checker popularizes the dance The Twist with his cover of the song of the same name.
Psycho, an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, becomes a landmark in graphic violence and cinema sensationalism. The screeching violins heard at this point in the song are a trademark of the film's soundtrack.
Belgians in the Congo: The Republic of the Congo (Léopoldville) was declared independent of Belgium.
Ernest Hemingway dies by suicide after a long battle with depression.
Adolf Eichmann, a "most wanted" Nazi war criminal, is convicted in Israel for crimes against humanity during World War II.
Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Robert A. Heinlein, is a breakthrough best-seller with themes of sexual freedom and liberation.
Bob Dylan (then known as Robert Zimmerman) is signed to Columbia Records after a New York Times review by critic Robert Shelton.
1970s
Watergate: The Republican burglary of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office complex leads to the resignation of President Nixon.
Punk rock is birthed with the formation of bands such as the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.
Menachem Begin becomes Prime Minister of Israel and negotiates the Camp David Accords with Egypt's president.
Ronald Reagan, former governor of California, begins his US presidential campaign in 1976, and is elected in 1980.
Palestine: The ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict escalates as Israelis establish settlements in the West Bank.
Terror on the airline: Numerous aircraft hijackings take place, including an Air France flight diverted to Uganda, where the plane was stormed in Operation Entebbe.
The Ayatollah restored to leadership in Iran: The Iranian Revolution replaces secular Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with Islamic rule by Ayatollahs led by former exile Ruhollah Khomeini.
Russians invade Afghanistan: The Soviet Union deploys its army into Afghanistan, beginning a decade-long war.
1980s
Wheel of Fortune, an American television game show that had debuted in 1975, becomes widely popular after hiring new hosts Pat Sajak and Vanna White.
Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space by flying aboard Challenger on the STS-7 shuttle mission.
Heavy metal suicide: A 19-year-old man commits suicide after listening to "Suicide Solution" and the family files a lawsuit against Ozzy Osbourne.
Foreign debts: Persistent trade and budget deficits lead to numerous countries defaulting on their debts.
Homeless vets: Veterans of the Vietnam War, including many disabled in the service, are becoming homeless and impoverished.
AIDS: The immunodeficiency disease caused by HIV emerges as a pandemic.
Crack cocaine became a widely used form of the drug in impoverished inner cities.
Bernie Goetz shoots four young black men who were trying to mug him on a New York City subway train, and is acquitted of charges.
Hypodermics on the shores: Medical waste was found washed up on the beaches of Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut after being illegally dumped at sea.
China under martial law: China declares martial law, resulting in the use of military forces against protesting students to end the Tiananmen protests.
Rock and roller sponsored cola wars: Soft drink giants Coke and Pepsi each run marketing campaigns using rock & roll and popular music stars, including Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.