And yet, for a song so indelibly time-stamped and frozen in the year of its completion, We Didnt Start the Fire has had a remarkably long afterlife. In the almost 32 years since its release, it has spawned countless parodies, from the niche (a friend recently told me that her former colleagues once performed a company-specific rendition theyd written for an office party) to the mainstream (a 2019 Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon bit in which the stars of Avengers: Endgame attempted to summarize the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe). The Office and Parks and Recreation both featured Fire riffs. And this year, a history-based podcast named after the song debuted; hosts Katie Puckrik and Tom Fordyce devote an entire episode to each of the topics Joel mentions in the song. (Suffice to say, theyre going to be at it for a while.)
There have also been the pandemic-era memes. Today was like if we didnt start the fire was a day, the TV writer Matt Warburton tweeted on March 12, 2020, and shortly after a therapist named Brittany Barkholtz went viral when she took him up on this challenge: Schools close, Tom Hanks, trouble in the big banks, no vaccine, quarantine, no more toilet paper seen. Plenty of sequels followed, tailored to the most surreal headlines of the day.
When I listen to the song now, I cant say I believe it to be objectively good but there is something enjoyable about the over-the-top absurdity of it. (It is certainly one of my go-to karaoke standards.) More than anything, though, I am amazed that all the way back in 1989 Joel somehow managed to predict the precise, decontextualized mania that I feel when Ive spent too long on the internet. At any given moment, I can log onto Twitter and experience a sequence of flat, oddly juxtaposed phrases being shouted at me with the intensity of a man growling Trouble in the Sueezzzz.read more
Even Billy Joel Mocked ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’ I Loved It.
