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Post by krazymack on Jan 24, 2004 13:03:08 GMT -5
Does anyone remember this song? This 1989 Billy Joel track was very historical, educational, and factual. (Unlike many of the songs we have today)
It was also ultra catchy. In fact, I think I can remember some of the words today:
We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No we didn't light it But we tried to fight it
I really loved this #2 CHR hit when it was out.
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Keith3000
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Post by Keith3000 on Jan 24, 2004 13:14:00 GMT -5
Excellent song! This and "The Piano Man" (a very different sounding song from this) are my favorite Billy Joel songs.
You really have to listen to this track a number of times to get all the lyrics!
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Post by FreakyFlyBry on Jan 24, 2004 13:31:43 GMT -5
Great song! This has to hold the record for most historical figures mentioned in a single song, it always fascinated me.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 24, 2004 13:45:24 GMT -5
I used to like it. I knew all the words. I haven't listened to it in a few years though.
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j
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Post by j on Jan 24, 2004 16:47:41 GMT -5
I really like this song. Billy Joel's very talented and I've enjoyed hunting down all his older singles and listening to them.
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BillboardBoy
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Post by BillboardBoy on Jan 24, 2004 17:02:29 GMT -5
It was alright but a little overplayed.
I was a little surprised that it hit #1 in Billboard, yet only #2 in R&R. R&R was more accepting of AC artists, so it seemed like Billy would've done better.
It was much better than the follow-up, "I Go To Extremes."
However, I did like "The Down Easter Alexa."
"And So It Goes" was kind of plain and uninteresting.
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jond7699
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Post by jond7699 on Jan 24, 2004 21:16:16 GMT -5
I love this song so much. This will defintiely go down in history as a classic. One of Billy's best songs ever. My absolute favorite would have to be "The Downeastern Alexa"
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jimmy74747
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Post by jimmy74747 on Jan 24, 2004 23:15:14 GMT -5
Great song. Lyrically, one of the best ever.
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Hervard
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Post by Hervard on Jan 25, 2004 12:22:03 GMT -5
It was alright but a little overplayed. Quite frankly, this was just a history lesson set to music, not a song. As Jimmy Guterman and Owen McDonnell say in their book "The Worst Rock & Roll Records Of All Time", "a list is not a song" (that's one of their 33 1/3 Rules of Rock and Roll) Yeah, but as you said R&R was more accepting of AC artists. A prime example of an AC artist was at number one the weeks this song spent at #2. - Phil Collins I liked that song a lot better. I did, too, although that charted only on A/C. Ever hear the follow-up to that one, "That's Not Her Style"? That made a brief showing on the Gavin Top 40 chart, which was used for the short-lived "Dave Sholin's Insider", so it's entirely possible that it came close to the R&R Top 40 chart. Yeah, I guess I can see how that one would seem boring, but I liked it a lot. Too bad it petered out at #30 on the R&R chart, though it did well at A/C radio.
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johnnywest
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Post by johnnywest on Jan 26, 2004 10:45:01 GMT -5
I remember how Shadoe used to "give a history listen" for the first few weeks that WDSTF was in the Top 40. He'd take a verse and describe what everything was. :)
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ct2874
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Post by ct2874 on Jan 26, 2004 19:51:13 GMT -5
What disappoints me about this one is how Billy (I suppose for time purposes and to not make the song sound cumbersome) was how toward the end he virtually breezed through the seventies and eighties.
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mst3k
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Post by mst3k on Jan 26, 2004 21:25:51 GMT -5
Hmmm... maybe it was a sly commentary on how much faster time seems to go by the older one gets? And the fact that the song would take up the whole album otherwise.
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Post by reception on Jan 27, 2004 6:01:39 GMT -5
It's alright but I find it a bit cheesy.
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Hervard
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Post by Hervard on Jan 27, 2004 14:07:28 GMT -5
What disappoints me about this one is how Billy (I suppose for time purposes and to not make the song sound cumbersome) was how toward the end he virtually breezed through the seventies and eighties. Just the opposite, on the millennium version of Kenny G's "Auld Lang Syne", they breezed through the first half of the 1900's and then included more recent stuff (of course, news media became more and more prominent as time went by)
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WhySoSerious?
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Post by WhySoSerious? on Jan 27, 2004 14:38:22 GMT -5
I loved. I still have the cassette single.
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prenatt1166
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Post by prenatt1166 on Jan 27, 2004 22:31:03 GMT -5
UU-BRU Radio Playlist [red]For Week Ending October 28, 1989[/red] (Rank This Week, Last Week, Artist, Title) 01 02 Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire 02 01 Barbra Streisand - We're Not Making Love Anymore 03 03 Patti Labelle - If You Asked Me To 04 07 Bad English - When I See You Smile 05 12 Milli Vanilli - Blame It On The Rain 06 04 Janet Jackson - Miss You Much 07 05 Young MC - Bust A Move 08 08 Aerosmith - Love In An Elevator 09 06 Cher - If I Could Turn Back Time 10 11 New Kids On The Block - Didn't I Blow Your Mind WDSTF was Billy Joel's 9th number one single (and last to date). It spent 5 weeks at number one and finished 1989 at #5. www.keystonehighways.com/uubru1989.html:)
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Post by reception on Aug 17, 2004 19:13:05 GMT -5
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Libra
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My Charts
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Post by Libra on Mar 25, 2005 14:25:56 GMT -5
I've heard this a few times on WMJO recently - I love it.
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Post by kellydicted on Mar 25, 2005 15:01:28 GMT -5
Haha! In grade 12 History our teacher made us listen to this Anways, I don't like it very much...it's too choppy and all over the place..like history :o
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WhySoSerious?
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Post by WhySoSerious? on Mar 25, 2005 15:27:39 GMT -5
I like it, but not as much as I used to. I had the cassette single.
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Post by Walking Contradiction on Mar 25, 2005 21:03:54 GMT -5
I kinda like this, but I think Billy Joel in general is overrated.
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Post by eric on Mar 25, 2005 22:30:06 GMT -5
I only remember/know this song because of "Cactus Chief playing 'We Didn't Start The Fire' on the flute."
Hell yes for Conan O'Brien.
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NORTHCOAST
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Post by NORTHCOAST on Mar 26, 2005 21:51:38 GMT -5
I think I was more interested in learning the history behind the lyrics, than in digging the actual song. I don't know the history of some of the items. But just was talking about the "children of Thalidomide" today. In case you don't remember, it was a drug that some pregnant women took that caused horrible birth defects where the babies had disfigured arms and legs. So sad.
We Didn’t Start The Fire
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen Maciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No we didn't light it But we tried to fight it
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dancron Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez
We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No we didn't light it But we tried to fight it
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball Starkwether, Homicide, Children of Thalidomide Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo
We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No we didn't light it But we tried to fight it
Hemingway, Eichman, Stranger in a Strange Land Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician sex J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say
We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No we didn't light it But we tried to fight it
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law Rock and Roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore
We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No we didn't light it But we tried to fight it
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Michael1973
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Post by Michael1973 on Mar 27, 2005 22:33:26 GMT -5
I rememeber when this song was on AT40, Shadoe Stevens began doing a weekly feature where he'd pick a verse and explain what each historical reference was. This lasted all of 3 weeks and was dropped...
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shocker
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Post by shocker on Jul 17, 2007 6:17:24 GMT -5
"We Didn't Start the Fire" is one of those songs that people either love or hate - very few in-between opinions.
As for me, I love it! I appreciate the way he put all the events in a near-chronological order throughout the song. I read where he didn't even have to look all those events up - he wrote them down by memory in order as they took place.
Storm Front is a great album. Nobody even mentioned the best song on that album - "Leningrad".
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dth1971
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Post by dth1971 on Dec 29, 2007 10:45:05 GMT -5
Do you remember the 1989 #1 hit for Billy Joel with mentions of events of the past called "We Didn't Start the Fire"?
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Post by unicorns on Dec 30, 2007 15:19:09 GMT -5
It's pretty good.
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Post by tico on Dec 30, 2007 15:29:43 GMT -5
I didn't think it would be a #1 hit. Really cool song, though.
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Hervard
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Post by Hervard on Jan 2, 2008 17:30:52 GMT -5
This song violates one of the 33 rules of rock & roll, the one that states "A list is not a song".
The song peaked at #2 on the R&R chart, as Phil Collins leapfrogged over it with a more meaningful song "Another Day In Paradise". I heard that in Joel's second week at #1 on Billboard, the margin between him and Phil was razor-thin.
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Mega248
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Post by Mega248 on Jan 3, 2008 0:58:03 GMT -5
Love it. This and "River of Dreams" are probably my favorite songs form him.
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