“We Didn't Start The Fire” by Billy Joel

"We Didn't Start the Fire" is Billy Joel's history lesson on fast-forward, a single from his 1989 album Storm Front, produced with Mick Jones. It's a list song: 119 headlines from politics, culture, science and sport between 1949, the year Joel was born, and 1989, fired off in roughly the order they happened.

Joel rattles the names off over a relentless, clattering beat, with Liberty DeVitto's drums and a pile of percussion driving it along and Joel himself on clavinet. It gave him his third number-one single in the US, and it has since been parodied and repurposed endlessly on TV and in ads. Its author was never a fan, though: he later likened it to a dentist's drill and called it awful as music, and plenty of later critics have agreed it ranks among his worst.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.