Song 15 "We Didn't Start the Fire"

"We Didn't Start the Fire" was written by Billy Joel in 1989.

This song is a list of things that happened in the second half of the 20th century. The song was trying to say how crazy the world was before Joel's generation (baby boomers). They didn't start the craziness.

The song is more of a story in the way that it just lists the things. You have to look them up if you want to know what they are talking about. Joel did live when everything was happening and the people who were listening to the song knew exactly what he was talking about. In that way it did offer a more current perspective. The language is really just a string of words, but it is quite catchy.

I slightly liked this song. Well, mostly I liked the chorus. The rest of the song is hard to sing along to so I didn't really enjoy that much. It is interesting to look up some of the events Joel mentions and find out what they are about.

This song can help you learn about the 20th century... if you take the time to look them up. You aren't going to learn anything other than a list of words by just listening to the song. It also shows that people then thought that things were getting pretty chaotic. It was an active century and so many things happened.