round 2

(2) RICK DEES AND HIS CAST OF IDIOTS, “DISCO DUCK”
PUT OUT
(7) billy joel, “we didn’t start the fire”
149-133
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 12.

matt bell on “we didn’t start the fire”

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray

Billy Joel, sitting down in 1989 to write "We Didn't Start the Fire" at the age of forty, begins with Harry Truman's inauguration, thereby opening his next no. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 by invoking Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki four years earlier.
And here I am, writing about "We Didn't Start the Fire" at the almost-matching age of thirty-nine, thinking about where I would begin my own song chronicling the first decades of the history that unfolded during my lifetime, with similar benefits of hindsight.
It's hard to believe I wouldn't start out writing about war too. It's hard to believe I wouldn't end up at fire. But maybe my fire wouldn't be only a metaphor.

South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

For instance, the first two lines of the song cover the year 1949, the year of Joel's birth. The same year, the Mann Gulch fire burned 4500 acres of Montana's Gates of the Mountains Wild Areas. Thirteen firefighters died, including a campground fire guard and twelve smokejumpers.
This is the perhaps the first notable named American wildfire of Billy Joel's life.
It won't be the last.
The longer this history unfolds, the more of his country—and later mine—is burning. Figuratively, sure, but also literally. As for me, I won't be born for a while yet. Inside the world of this song, I show up many verses later, somewhere between "Russians in Afghanistan" and "Wheel of Fortune": a babe of no historical note.
But also: a future Billy Joel fan.
Just not one of this song.

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television

The temptation of this essay initially was to write about the song's historical events in some way, or at least Joel's selections, but it seems almost impossible to do so well. What could I possibly say about Joe McCarthy that hasn't been said before? Could I even unpack what Joel is saying about him, if he's saying anything at all?
Surely compiling a list of acoustically-compatible historical events and personages must be a lot easier than having a coherent general theory of history. In any case, from the songwriter's perspective, what's more significant: McCarthy's dark deeds or the sound his name makes in the lyric?

North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

The best I might be able to do is to try to frame these events through their intersections with my own life, mimicking in some way an imagined version Joel's process of selecting from his personal lived experience of history. For instance, this verse makes me think about how my grandparents fought in World War II, while my oldest uncles enlisted or were drafted during Vietnam. The Korean War, on the other hand, was something I was aware of but didn't know much about or even hear referenced often. When I was 19, I had a boss at Dow Corning who was slightly older than my dad but younger than my uncles, and so had served as a fighter pilot in Korea. He was my first human link to that conflict, not that we ever talked about it. I only knew because there was a photograph on his office shelf showing him in uniform standing beside his plane, the frame tucked between awards the company had given him for his many patents. We worked together in an emulsions lab, my hands working for his brain, our group tasked with pure research toward what might one day become new and innovative hand lotions.
War, in those pre-9/11 years, seem very distant from my life.
I didn't see a Marilyn Monroe movie until I was in my thirties. For a decade before, the main thing I thought of when I heard her name was her black and white jacket that appears as a MacGuffin in the film of Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys, where Tobey McGuire tells Michael Douglas how small Monroe was, and how a lot of people don't know that about her.

Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom

This is one of the rare lines where I imemediately know three-quarters of the references—I feel proud of myself, even though 75% is barely a passing grade. (Punmunjom was the only one I had to look up: Korea, again.) I know I'm probably not the only American with a tentative grasp on world history, even though it was one of my favorite subjects in school. Maybe it has something to do with the way we were taught it?
For instance, when I was in seventh grade, my history teacher passed out the lyrics to "We Didn't Start the Fire" and told us we had to use the classroom's set of encyclopedias to figure out the historical events referenced in every line. This was 1991 or 1992, firmly pre-internet in rural Michigan, where we didn't yet have a computer in every classroom. Then he put the song on repeat and left the room to give us time to work and him time to visit the teacher's lounge, where in those days it was still legal to smoke indoors, even inside a school. We spent so much time doing this: listening to Billy Joel on repeat for the entire period, searching the encyclopedias unsupervised, with most of the class just trying to cheat off the people who tried, like me.
My memory could be faulty, but I'm pretty sure our teacher didn't come back for two weeks.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that you, the reader of this essay, may have your own story about being taught history via this song. Internet searches reveal that students are still being assigned this task of hunting down the many historical references in "We Didn't Start the Fire," despite it being over thirty years old, despite the fact that nowadays you can just visit the song's Wikipedia page and find every single reference helpfully annotated, organized by year.
This essay, as may already be obvious, takes on the format of that assignment: lyrics as section headers, student answers below, some possibly right, many likely wrong.

Brando, "The King and I" and "The Catcher in the Rye"

My family was a dedicated Billy Joel household—we listened to him often in our house, but especially on long road trips in the family van—but Storm Front wasn't our favorite, although I remember falling hard for "Stalingrad" and "The Downeaster 'Alexa'" at some point. Those were the album's "story songs," as we called them, and that's what I loved most, what my dad loved most. Sometimes, long before I'd ever heard a song, I'd heard my dad's retelling of it: Charlie Daniels' "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," for instance, I heard first in my dad's retelling.
Billy Joel wrote a lot of great story songs, but "We Didn't Start the Fire" isn't one of them. If it's the story of anything, it's the ceaseless march of American achievement and trivia and atrocity, all strung into one relentless onslaught of historical rhyme. I've always found it jarring, even in its original setting on Storm Front, and generally a bit embarrassing.
Which doesn't keep me from loving it some too. Because everyone seems to love We Didn't Start the Fire a little bit, even if they also hate it.

Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen

Okay, okay. I'm complaining too much. So many people love this song. Let's say an argument could be made for its greatness. Probably it could.
But why try, in a tournament devoted to Badness?
As instantly recognizable as it likely is to most American listeners, even Billy Joel has described the melody of "We Didn't Start the Fire" as a "dentist drill" or a "mosquito droning," the latter on more than one occasion: "It's terrible musically. It's like a mosquito buzzing around your head."

Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

If I had to say something nice here to offset my first complaints, I might say this: this is a pretty smart line. As a kid, I never quite heard the end of it right, likely because "Santayana" was hard for me to hold on to, raised as I was among rural Irish Catholics. I think I've been singing some random jumble of syllables there most of my life, and still the "goodbye" often sounds like "Goodbar" to me. Missing Santayana's name means that until now I also missed one of the song's cleverest thematic references: among other aphorisms, George Santayana famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

To live in the West now is to live with an omnipresent anxious fear of fire season, where every year some part of your state will be burning. Maybe because of this, I can no longer hear Joel's repeated chorus about unquenchable metaphorical fires without thinking of literal ones. For over a month in 2019, I could continuously see a forest fire burning from my house in Mesa, Arizona. Named the Woodbury Fire, it started in the nearby Superstition Wilderness, a vast stretch of Sonoran Desert mountains, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. Most of the Superstitions are still untouched by development. 123,000 acres of desert would eventually burn. Caused by human activity, the fire had to be fought in hundred degree temperatures, while a delayed start to monsoon season meant conditions were dryer than usual. From hiking in the Superstition Mountains, I know there's an invasive species there called buffel grass that burns at incredible temperatures, producing flames up to twenty-five feet tall. Meanwhile, the Sonoran Desert lacks much fire adaptation: seemingly, wildfires weren't part of its evolutionary path. And so it's the invasive species that cause most of the harm, that stand to benefit most when native species can't recover afterward. Buffel grass, human beings. The dangers we brought, the dangers we are. 

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev

The music video for "We Didn't Start the Fire" depicts Billy Joel as an unseen but omnipresent observer watching a family grow through the decades he's singing about. It begins with a couple walking through the door on their wedding day—the bride throws her veil at the kitchen table where Joel is sitting, but he disappears, letting it pass through untouched—and continues through to the death of the husband. Most of the video's scenes are jokily nostalgic; throughout, Joel is usually onscreen, impassively watching or else beating out the song's rhythm with improvised drumsticks: wooden spoons, a baby rattle, his palms against a table top. It's a playful, gleeful video, in which Joel sings the names of dictators and disasters, a ghost haunting this stereotypical white American dreamhouse with all that made it possible.

Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

I was a Cold War kid, but just barely. I felt like my awareness of global conflict began with the 1990-1991 Gulf War, which broke out when I was in fifth grade, one year and five days after "We Didn't Start the Fire" was released as a single, a couple months longer since it'd been recorded in July 1989. A year later, in 1992, the Bosnian War came into our classrooms by way of Channel One, with Lisa Ling and Anderson Cooper reporting—and then, when I was twenty-one, the September 11 attacks happened, followed shortly by the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nothing was the same afterward, and yet: it also was, most days. The seemingly collapsing gap this left between the banal and the horrific is where many Americans live our mostly safe lives, a place that nonetheless seems increasingly maddening, perhaps as incoherent as this song's total lack of judgment of the causes of any of the events it related.
Still, I can't help thinking: wouldn't some of what's above be what I might put into my own song like this? Wouldn't I, if I were a version of Billy Joel born in 1980, find myself eventually trying to rhyme "Bosnia-Herzegovina" with whatever I could?

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron

As I was finishing the last section, I realized that "cold war kid" is a phrase I likely retained from "Leningrad," one of my favorite songs on Storm Front: "Cold war kids were hard to kill," Joel sings, "under their desks in an air raid drill." One of the only things my dad—just five years younger than Billy Joel—has ever told me scared him was exactly this: doing air raid drills as a kid against the threat of nuclear war, which gave him nightmares. All these references I don't know, they make up the geopolitical background radiation of my father's life, tied intimately to the economy he thrived in, the culture he celebrated, the lingering fears that must have kept him up some nights, sometime. Listening to Billy Joel is sometimes like listening to my dad think; or else, like hearing feelings I've never heard him express, but that I imagine he might have.

Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"

Somewhere around my tenth listen, I start wondering if it's even possible to say anything coherent about the content you repeat in this list format. What good is this list of historical happenings without commentary, beyond that they were interesting enough for Joel to remember or research while simultaneously fitting the melody? It makes me like of Patrik Ourednik's Europeana, a novel that retells the history of the twentieth century in a flat affect refusing to moralize about the events it relates. In a review, the novelist Andrew Ervin memorably likened the novel to the ticker that scrolls across the bottom of cable news channels—and isn't that the effect of "We Didn't Start the Fire" too, where "H-Bomb" and "Joseph Stalin" are sung in the same maniacal cheer as Buddy Holly and hula hoops?

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team

How hard can it possibly be to write a song like this? Given the dozens and dozens of parodies that exist of it, doesn't it seem like anyone could do this? Surely it doesn't take a genius.

Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Sackler and Klobuchar, everyone's self-driving cars
Roger Stone, Russian memes, Tide pod teens
Ted Cruz, fake news, Beto and the Bernie Bros

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev

Climate change, glacial melt, racist robocalls
Sex cult, vaping death, no more plastic straws
Border walls, stock records, gutted election laws

Princess Grace, "Peyton Place," trouble in the Suez

Beyond Meat, Mayor Pete, Jay-Z a billionaire
Weinstein, Epstein, the President shares his legal team
Red caps, iPhone X, manufactured fear
Anxiety meds, meditation apps, 2019 the longest year

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Maybe it's harder than it looks. But still: to what end do we do this? The only place Billy Joel reflects is in its famous chorus. But what's the argument? Is it that everything that happened in the first forty years of Billy Joel's life is the fault of the generation that came before? That seems reasonably hard to argue with, up to a point. But at 40, you've been complicit a long time. "We tried to fight it" feels like a pretty weak argument for the defense. Especially thirty years later.
But then I'm 39, and I'm not sure what I have to say that's any better. Like Joel, I've spent most of my adult life making my art, often about serious subjects, important topics, things that matter to me. That doesn't mean I can't look around from the likely halfway point of my life in despair, thinking, "Have I done enough? Is it possible to hope to?"

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac

There are ten songs on Storm Front. On top of "We Didn't Start the Fire," four other songs cracked the top 100: "I Go to Extremes," "And So It Goes," "The Downeaster 'Alexa'," and "That's Not Her Style." Joel's version of "Shameless" didn't do much, but Garth Brooks' cover went No. 1 on the Country charts  two years later. Like me, Brooks was a member of either the BMG or Columbia record clubs, and received Billy Joel's Storm Front as one of his monthly selections: "I was on the road for six months with no one to check the mail," Brooks said, "and came home to find six compact discs in my mailbox." What did those CDs cost back then? $16.99? $18.99? That's how much it cost Brooks to find his next No. 1.
For Joel, "We Didn't Start the Fire" would be Storm Front's only chart-topping hit. It later lost the Grammy for Record of the Year to Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings," a song I usually find equally grating, and then, every once in a while, equally surprisingly moving.

Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"

1957. Halfway through the song and we've only come eight years. Now the space race begins, 23 years before my birth. Still, this is the American mythology I would love the most as a kid, my own personal site of patriotism: how despite our early setbacks, America would go on to win the space race, then the Cold War. But now, many years later, the space shuttle is mothballed and it seems Russia is rising again, winning the internet. Sputnik again, maybe, and shouldn't we be just as terrified as all the space race movies I've seen tell me we were?

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball

This is the first line in the song where I know less about the domestic affairs than the foreign ones. Perhaps because, unlike Billy Joel, I never lived in a world without California baseball.

Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide

Kudos, I suppose, for rhyming murder with birth defects.

Buddy Holly, "Ben Hur," space monkey, Mafia

This is a totally irrational anger, but here goes: there were two space monkeys, not one, and their names were Able and Baker. I'd rather talk about them than most of the people Joel properly named.

Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

My dad used to talk about the 1959 failure of the Edsel, a story which later got mixed up with the apparently false legend of the Chevy Nova, introduced in 1962, whose name, the story said, could be (incorrectly) translated as "doesn't go" in Spanish. The story claimed this meant the Nova sold poorly in Mexico; eventually, in our household, that false story got attached to the Edsel instead. But the details didn't line up and halfway between telling it—usually because this song was on—someone would get confused and let the story slowly trail off, unfinished.
One trait I share with my dad: we tend to remember facts not exactly as they are but in the way they're most useful to us, the way they make the best story. We've both got a slightly fuzzy grasp on reality, maybe, but a lot of good stories.

U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy

I didn't remember who Syngman Rhee was before starting this essay, so before today I heard something else in its place, a mishearing now erased by learning his significance. But again, for the third time: the reference I don't know is from the Korean War. A lack in my knowledge, pointed out again and again here, that I plan to start rectifying after I finish this writing.

Chubby Checker, "Psycho," Belgians in the Congo

I watched Psycho for the first time this past year, not long after I saw my first Marilyn Monroe movie. Like many of my favorite essays, it contains within it a feint: it seems to be about Marion Crane, but she barely lasts a third of the movie. The whole time, Norman Bates is waiting, ready to emerge as the novel's true subject.

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

I didn't start the fire I could see from my house. The Woodbury Fire was manmade but not by me; still wherever I saw it from—the sidewalk in front of my house, the road to and from work, the top of a ridgeline elsewhere in the valley, during a trail run across safe ground—I felt indicted, complicit, grieving.
I can't imagine making a list like Joel made here of forty years of history and not feeling the same about the history I'd lived through. So little of the worst of what happens in the world is directly our individual fault. But enough of it is done in our name, or is an offshoot of our desires, all of it overlooked harm and unintended consequences spiraling out from the culture we've made together.

Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"

I read so much science fiction in the past few years, including Heinlein's, while working on my own novel set in both a mythological American past and a speculative American future. Thinking about what Joel includes in his historical tale and what he leaves out, I notice there's nothing about the environment in his song. His sung notables are the heroes and villains of capitalism vs. communism, and all the ephemera produced by the culture of that conflict. But I can no longer hear this song without feeling my anger at the generations before me, his generation, my father's generation, the first generation to be aware of the environmental ruin that led us to the increasingly runaway disaster of climate change. Another generation who didn't do enough, whose inaction made it harder for future generations to meaningfully act. Their fires are our fires now, and we have to decide if we have the will to put them out, while it's still possible to do so.

Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion

Somewhere around my thirtieth listen, I develop a newfound affection for the sliding rhyme here as Joel moves from Dylan to Berlin. Despite everything, there are still surprises.

"Lawrence of Arabia," British Beatlemania

Billy Joel supposedly got the idea for "We Didn't Start the Fire" after a conversation with a "21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon's," who complained that 1989 was an awful time to be 21, and that Billy Joel's generation had had it easier, because, apparently, "everybody knows that nothing happened in the 50s." Therefore "We Didn't Start the Fire" is simultaneously a complaint about older generations and a scold to younger ones.
I spent an inordinate amount of time this week googling "Sean Lennon's friend" but couldn't figure out who it was. Another name, lost to history, unfit for song. Maybe someone who knows will tell me, if they ever read this essay.

Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

It's no surprise to me that once again the reference I know best here is the one to the space race. But I also imagine it's partly that I've seen our leap into space recreated over and over, while growing up among people who definitely did not discuss riots over integration or anything else involving race in America. We weren't boxing fans either, except for Rocky, for what I imagine were similar reasons.

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex

As a very timid seventh-grader, I cringed every time the word "sex" echoed through our brick-walled classroom, the word repeated every four minutes or so for the entire time we worked on our "We Didn't Start the Fire" assignment. A little tiny bit of that feeling persists, even all these years later, as dumb as it was and is.

JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say

What else, what else? The song's going to go on for a while still, so there's definitely more, but I get the feeling. Billboard Magazine once asked Billy Joel if we could write a new version of "We Didn't Start the Fire," updating it for the continued passage of time. He quickly replied, "No, I wrote one song already and I don’t think it was really that good to begin with, melodically. I kind of like the lyric though."

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

In the music video, Billy Joel spends most of each lap of the chorus sitting at a 1950s-style kitchen table, while a literal fire burns behind him, consuming a giant print of an otherwise unmentioned historical atrocity. At the one-minute thirty mark, for instance, he sings the chorus in front of a photograph published in Life Magazine in 1937, of the lynching of Robert McDaniels, who was chained to a tree and tortured with a blowtorch by a white mob. The photo was taken just before McDaniels was burned alive—and as the chorus ends, the larger-than-life print behind Joel burns and rips along a center seam.
Joel wears black sunglasses throughout the video, despite it being set indoors, despite the fact that he is in every one of these chorus-accompanying scenes facing away from the fire, the lit photographs, the unnamed and unsung dead burning behind him.

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again

We're twelve to thirteen years before my birth here, but now firmly in the era that informs my own childhood. Only as an adult would I realize how many of the toys I grew up with—the action figures, the toy guns and plastic army helmets—are artifacts of the Vietnam War, brought home by the American men who fought it, then reimagined as toys for children.
In the same seventh grade class where I searched the encyclopedias for the history behind "We Didn't' Start the Fire," me and several classmates made a video project with my parents' enormous video camera about the Vietnam War, which I know now was exactly as dumbly offensive as you might imagine a teenage movie about Vietnam might be, if made by kids as badly educated as we were.

Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock

Billy Joel gets all the credit, but there are so many songs like "We Didn't Start the Fire," including many that came out a decade or more earlier. In 1972, the same year as the Watergate scandal, The Statler Brothers released a song titled "Do You Remember These," which begins: "Saturday morning serials / Chapters one through fifteen / Fly paper, penny loafers, and lucky strike green / Flat tops, sock hops, Studebaker, Pepsi, please / Ah, do you remember these?"
Just two years later, in 1974, a year Billy Joel marks here only with "punk rock," Joey Levine sang "Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)": "B.B. Bumble and the Stingers, Mott the Hoople, Ray Charles Singers / Lonnie Mack and twangin' Eddy, here's my ring we're goin' steady / Take it easy, take me higher, liar liar, house on fire / Locomotion, Poco, Passion, Deeper Purple, Satisfaction Baby," and so on and so forth, eventually leading to a similarly titular chorus, "life is a rock but the radio rolled me."
Joel's 1989 "We Didn't Start the Fire" is surely the most famous of these nostalgic list songs, but it wasn't the first and won't be the last. The website TV Tropes lists many examples, including countless parodies of "We Didn't Start the Fire," while being unable to resist their own take on the form: "Trope Namer: Joel, Billy, but troper, don't be silly/ he didn't invent the Long List, 'done before' that is the gist / googling it in a hurry brings up a dude named Tim Curry / who did sing "I Do The Rock" —obscure today, such bad luck."

Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline

Tim Curry, who for me is always Pennywise the Clown, from Stephen King's nostalgia-horror novel IT, whose story begins the year before Billy Joel was born and ends four years before Storm Front, its two parts rough parentheses for Billy Joel's life at the time of "We Didn't Start the Fire."
Anyway.
Curry's 1979 "I do the Rock" predates Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" by ten years, and seems to me one of the better-written examples of the form: "John and Yoko farming beef / Raising protein quota / Sometimes they make love and art / Inside their Dakota / Rodney's feeling sexy / Mick is really frightfully bold / Me, I do the only thing that / stops me growing old / I do the Rock."
It's also further proof that it is likely impossible to write one of these songs without having the chorus be the title.
Like his titular fire, Billy Joel didn't start this trend of nostalgic list songs. But he's the only one of these writers still singing his, the words unchanged, frozen in time, burning eternally.

Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

In three lines we've gone from 1972 to 1979, with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan bridging us into the eighties. My own familiarity with these events has less to do with learning history in school or on my own, and more to do with the level to which they've penetrated pop culture. "Russians in Afghanistan" has been a plot point in a number of movies, books, and video games I've ingested, including most recently the video game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, which takes place partly in the Afghanistan of the Soviet-Afghan War, but one almost entirely emptied of any sign of life except Russian soldiers there for you to shoot, brainwash, and conscript into your own army. How much of global military history have I learned only from video games, with real places full of real people turned into shooting galleries? Surely that's just as dumb as learning it from a pop song. Likely it's worse.

"Wheel of Fortune," Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide

One of the other years missing from the song, in which no songworthy events happen: 1980. The year of my birth. From here on out, these events from Billy Joel's lifetime are mine too. Pat Sajak takes over "Wheel of Fortune" in 1981, never leaves; Billy Joel's been singing "We Didn't Start the Fire" for more of my life than he hasn't been.

Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz

Time accelerates as the song moves toward its finish, specifics turning into gestures: other than "Bernie Goetz," everything else in this line spans years and years, often following us into the present. History now becomes less localized in time, less contained. Or is Joel as tired of history as he is of his mosquito drone melody? More likely it's merely that it's harder to know what's lastingly important from inside still-unfolding history. Make a list of the most important events of 2019, of 2020 so far. Aim for the same mix of domestic strife, foreign affairs, pop culture. Surely you'll get some of it right. But some of what seems important now will likely fade, while other events and persons become more important in retrospect.

Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law

Here's Joel again, this time on finishing the lyrics: "Originally in the last verse, after 'hypodermics on the shores,' I had 'poison apples in the store,' because that Alar thing was happening. And then they took the apples off the shelves. So then Tiananmen Square happened, and I put in the 'China under martial law' line. Then I said, 'Let’s get this record the hell out before anything else happens.'"
I have no idea what the "Alar thing" references. Neither does anyone else I've asked while writing this essay. Maybe because it was cut from this song, from which so many of us American schoolchildren learned our American history.

Rock and roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore

Billy Joel's not the only one who feels this way: a quick Google search today brought back 4,750,000 results for "I can't take it anymore." Although presumably they're not all referring to the same it.
Here's one of mine, an it I can't take: a world on fire, forever. Just in America, some names from my own lifetime I'd never want to hear in a song:

The Camp Fire of 2018, Woolsey, Carr, Mendocino Complex, British Columbia, Thomas, Wine Country, Lodgepole Complex, Rice Ridge, Alice Creek, Fort McMurray, Anderson Creek, Okanogan, the Northwest Territories, Carlton Complex, Rim, Yarnell Hill, Black Forest, Rush, Mustand Complex, Long Draw, Miller Homestead, Ash Creek, Waldo Canyon, High Park, Little Bear, Whitewater-Baldy Complex, Slave Lake, Las Concahs, Richardson Backcountry, Bastrop County Complex, Wallow, Binta Lake, Brittany Triangle, Highway 31, Basin Complex, Gap, Evans Road, Witch Creek, Harris, Zaca, Murphy Complex, Milford Flat, Warren Grove, Florida Bugaboo, Sweat Farm Road/Big Turnaround Complex, Day, Esperanza, Taylor Complex, Cedar, B&B Complex, Okanagan Mountain Park, Aspen, Florence/Sour Biscuit Complex, Hayman, Rodeo-Chediski—I was nearby for that one, which broke out right before I arrived in Arizona for the first time, fourteen years before I'd move there—McNally, Pinil Complex, Thirty Mile, Cerro Grande, Big Bar Complex, Silver Creek, Miller's Reach, Mount Vision, South Canyon, Laguna beach, Oakland Hills, Painted Cave, Yellowstone, Allen, the Swiss Fire of 1983.

Those are just the big ones. The ones with names. The ones that get their own entries on Wikipedia. Millions and millions of acres of burnt earth, contained in a paragraph; so much gone, all of it not so different from the incredible human loss gestured but not unpacked by Joel's breakneck litany.
I better finish this essay before another blaze breaks out.
The thing is, I didn't start these fires.
But also: of course I did. Of course we all did.
By the time Billy Joel was 40, the age when he wrote this song, did he think his generation were doing enough to stop them? Or was his "I can't take it anymore" the best he could do, the most he could say?
Is it really the best I can do in my life, or say in my books?
I hope not. I fear so.
What else is there to say about "We Didn't Start the Fire"? It's a bad song. It's a decent metaphor. As long as there's recorded music being played back, this song will likely be a part of that. And wherever it's playing, at least for the foreseeable future, something new will be burning.

Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House in 2021. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. A native of Michigan, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University. 

JANINE ANNETT ON “DISCO DUCK”

Disco—was it bad, or was it good?
The answer, of course, is subjective. It depends who you ask, and when you ask them, and where, and how many drugs they’re on.
“Disco Sucks” was a popular saying—and t-shirt—by the late 70s, when disco had more than gone mainstream. The commodified version of disco was everywhere; it became disco-as-Muzak. Saturday Night Fever and its soundtrack dominated the cultural landscape. Disco had taken over; even non-disco acts were disco-fying their latest records. To the disco-haters, rock n’ roll (maybe punk) was “real music”. It was rebellion and heart. Disco was made partly by man, partly by machine—a pacemaker that kept a steady beat but lacked the authentic thump of a real, live beating heart.
Of course, another opinion is that disco was a precursor to house music and hip-hop, radical in its own way, an antidote to the stale 70s corporate rock that was everywhere at the time. Coming out of the 60s, where there was a lot of folk music that had melody but lacked rhythm, a burgeoning disco scene provided a counterbalance—and its own counterculture. Like so many musical movements, disco wasn’t just a sound—it was a way of dressing, of dancing, of looking and acting and even accessorizing, disco balls and glitter and platform shoes. Disco was born in urban nightclubs; it was said to be embraced in its early years by a diverse audience and was home to a thriving gay scene. The Village People, of course, would capture this ethos and bring it to a mainstream audience (I’m always baffled by how many people don’t realize “YMCA” is about promiscuous gay sex, and I find it especially strange that it always seems to be played at heterosexual weddings).
The song “Disco Duck” originally came out in 1976, the height of the disco movement, and made it to #1 on October 16, 1976. It managed to hold on to the spot for a week. Rick Dees was a radio DJ at the station WMPS in Memphis, TN. The story is that Rick heard a guy doing a Donald Duck impression at his gym and he wrote the song and hired his gym buddy to do the duck voice on the song.
According to Tom Breihan, who wrote about “Disco Duck” as part of a series on #1 hits for Stereogum, “’Disco Duck’ routinely shows up on worst-songs-of-all-time lists, and it truly is a bad song… If ‘Disco Duck’ belongs to a musical tradition, it isn’t disco. It’s the novelty song, the fading art form that was huge in the late ’50s and early ’60s but dying out by the mid-’70s. It’s possible that “Disco Duck” is the last true novelty to hit #1.” Rick tried to follow up with another disco-novelty track, “Dis-Gorilla (Part One)” in 1977, but it only went to #56 on the charts. I guess it’s hard to follow up a duck with a gorilla.
The lyrics to “Disco Duck” are incredibly simple. The chorus—really the only memorable part of the song—goes like this: “Disco, disco duck, try your luck, don’t be a cluck” (of course, chickens cluck; ducks quack). The “plot” of the song, as it were, is that Disco Duck is at a party, and he flaps his arms (not wings; the song says “arms”) on the dance floor. This man-duck-chicken just can’t stay off the dance floor and… loves disco, I guess?
The way I came to know “Disco Duck” is because someone thought it was a good idea to expand this Disco Duck character into “Irwin the Disco Duck” (which makes it sound like someone’s grandfather from Boca took up disco). Amazingly, Peter Pan Records—fine purveyors of albums for children; I also distinctly remember a recording of Peter and the Wolf put out by the company—released nine albums featuring Irwin the Disco Duck, ranging from Disco Duck Dance Party in 1976 to Big Hits Dance Party in 1980. Somehow, my parents acquired Irwin the Disco Duck in the Navy (released in 1979). The album featured disco songs with intros from a guy doing a duck voice. That’s it. Disco songs with a duck-voiced guy—a poor man’s Donald Duck, if you will—introducing them. But my sister and I thought it was hilarious. We would dance around to the disco songs, not at Studio 54 (speaking of the mainstreaming of disco, we also lived near a roller skating rink called “Studio 59” which was on a street called Route 59) but in a living room—admittedly, one with a sound system with comically large speakers (my mother still has them to this day. They still work perfectly, as do the turntable, CD player, and dual cassette decks. I guess they made things to last back then).
I just played “Disco Duck” for my son and his friend and asked them what they thought of it. “Make it stop,” my son said. “This is horrible.” He did, somehow, know how to do a “disco dance”—you know, the one you think of when you think of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever with one arm up, finger pointing to the Disco gods. I didn’t teach him that. He somehow absorbed it from the cultural ether. It’s probably been lampooned in some cartoon he’s seen. Maybe Disco Stu on The Simpsons?
So I guess disco lives on. Is it good or is it bad? Who’s to say? It brought joy to millions of people, probably still does. And while “Disco Duck” is, by any measure, an objectively bad song, I have fond memories of dancing around to Disco Duck records with my family as a kid. That’s got to be worth something. Disco may or may not suck, but I’m okay with Irwin the Disco Duck.

* Fun fact: if you start googling a bunch of disco songs and clubs, you will get served up ads for things like a “Sequined V-neck Jumpsuit” (on sale for $193.20, size XS) or a “Disco Fever Blush Pink Metallic Jumpsuit” (only $68, available in XS—XL but sold out in size S).

Janine Annett is a writer who lives in New York. She previously wrote about hair metal for March Shredness and goth music for March Vladness. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the Rumpus, Real Simple, and many other places. Janine's website is www.janineannett.com.