Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
We Didn't Start the Fire
We Didn't Start the Fire is a song by Billy Joel that lists 120 well-known events, people, things, and places from his lifetime, from 1949 to 1989, when the song was released on his album Storm Front. Joel explained that he wrote this song due to his interest in history. He commented that he would have wanted to be a history teacher had he not become a rock and roll singer.
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1 Historical items referred to in the song 3 External links |
Historical items referred to in the song
The lyrics of We Didn't Start the Fire are essentially a long list of specific events, names, and places. The following are the "lists" as they appear in the song's lyrics, though in the actual song they are occasionally punctuated by the chorus. This song was very influential to American Culture at the time of its release in 1989
1949
1950
1951
- Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
- H-Bomb
- Sugar Ray Robinson
- Panmunjom
- Marlon Brando
- The King and I
- The Catcher in the Rye
1952
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Polio Vaccine
- Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom
- Rocky Marciano
- Liberace
- George Santayana
1953
- Joseph Stalin
- Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov
- Gamal Abdel Nasser
- Sergei Prokofiev
- Winthrop Rockefeller
- Roy Campanella
- Communist bloc
1954
1955
- Albert Einstein
- James Dean
- Brooklyn Dodgers World Series win
- Davy Crockett television series
- Peter Pan film by The Walt Disney Company
- Elvis Presley
- Disneyland
1956
- Brigitte Bardot
- Hungarian revolution in Budapest
- Montgomery Bus Boycott
- Nikita Khrushchev
- Grace Kelly
- Peyton Place
- Suez Crisis
1957
- Little Rock Crisis
- Boris Pasternak
- Mickey Mantle
- Jack Kerouac
- Sputnik program
- Chou En-lai
- The Bridge on the River Kwai
1958
- Lebanon Crisis
- Charles de Gaulle
- Los Angeles Dodgers
- San Francisco Giants
- Charles Starkweather
- Thalidomide
1959
1960
1961
- Hemingway
- Adolf Eichmann trial
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- Bob Dylan
- Berlin Wall
- Bay of Pigs Invasion
1962
- Lawrence of Arabia
- The Beatles
- James Meredith integrates the University of Mississippi
- John Glenn
- Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson fight
1963
1964-1989
- Birth control
- Ho Chi Minh
- U.S. presidential election, 1968 Richard Milhous Nixon
- Apollo 11
- Woodstock festival
- Watergate
- Punk rock
- Menachem Begin
- Ronald Reagan
- Palestine
- Aircraft hijacking
- Ruhollah Khomeini
- War in Afghanistan
- Wheel of Fortune
- Sally Ride
- Heavy metal music
- Suicide
- foreign debts
- Homelessness among Vietnam veterans
- AIDS
- Crack cocaine
- Bernhard Goetz
- Medical waste found on beaches after being illegally dumped at sea.
- Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
- Rock and Roll
- Cola wars
- Information overload
Criticism
Blender Magazine ranked "We Didn't Start the Fire" on its list of the "50 Worst Songs Ever". "We Didn't Start the Fire" also appeared on VH1's "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever", a collaboration with Blender.
External links
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