We Didn't Start The Fire
Yep, I read a story the other day by New York Times music critic Lindsay Zoladz. She has a fascination with people's “first favorite things.” So she was trying to remember her first favorite song. The tune happened to be Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” which was number one on the Billboard chart in 1989.
My first favorite song (and I’ll probably be heckled like hell for admitting this) was Chubby Checker’s “Hooka Tooka.” The lyrics go, “Hooka tooka, my soda cracker, does your mama chaw tobacca?” I still sing that one once in a while. But only when nobody’s around. I think most people who like that song probably wear a straw hat and smoke a corncob pipe.
So back to “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” I always liked the song and surprisingly so does my son Jake, a 19-year-old MassArt student. But today it ranks among the worst, most hated songs of all time. Even Billy Joel himself compared it to a monotonous melody, like a dentist’s drill or a droning mosquito. What the Christ?
I listened to the song again and read the lyrics. “Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Disneyland, Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev, birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again. Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide, foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz, hypodermics on the shore, China under martial law.” And the lyric that always hit me the hardest…"JFK blown away, what else do I have to say?”
So here’s what I’ve gotta say after listening to that tune. Man, we have lived through a lot and we’ve made it to this point with a lot of grit. These are really wild and scary times too, but like every other time, we’ll get through it. Keep your dukes up.