the first round
(7) billy joel, “we didn’t start the fire”
defeated
(10) eric clapton, “i shot the sheriff”
291-280
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, watch the videos (if available), listen to the songs, feel free to argue, tweet at us, and consider. Then vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 2.
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.
tom mcallister: 7 notes on “i shot the sheriff”
Slowhand
For months, I have been trying to crystallize my thoughts on Eric Clapton’s ubiquitous, soulless rendition of “I Shot the Sheriff,” still the only Number 1 hit of his prolific career. Although I have heard this song thousands of times, though I burned it onto a minimum of 4 CDs during college, though I have semi-consciously sung along to it during traffic jams, it is, all things considered, a boring and trite song. It is the sort of rock song that makes an emotionally distant man close his eyes and sway a little bit as he yawps, “I say!” just before the chorus hits. Clapton’s version presents the facade of depth without containing the requisite depth. Its somewhat cryptic, possibly allegorical lyrics, make it feel mythic. When the song comes on, at least one guest at your party will start nodding seriously, slightly off the beat, and they will say Clapton is God. They will say he’s the king of the blues. They will use his nickname, Slowhand, without any apparent awareness of how gross it sounds.
I’ve been the young man approximating emotional release by singing along, the guy taking a pause from boozing too hard in order to really feel the music, the guy who knows everything about blues and thinks you ought to check out his early stuff if you’re really serious about it.
I entered my Clapton phase in high school, and for a few years, he was deeply important to me. Sometime in college, I stopped listening to him and mostly forgot about his music. Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched every live performance of this song I can find on YouTube—each one claiming to be the best version ever recorded, each one claiming to feature the best solo—and I have felt nothing at all.
A couple weeks ago, after struggling with this essay all morning, I went to the dentist for a scheduled cleaning. As he scraped my teeth with that absurd hook, he hummed along to a Bad Company song that was playing on the radio. He turned to the hygienist and said, "At least it's not ‘I Shot the Sheriff.’" He explained to me that the day before, every time he sat down to work on a patient, “I Shot the Sheriff” came on the radio, like magic. A few dozen sets of teeth inspected to the soundtrack of Clapton’s weird reggae patois (it was never the Marley version, they insisted). I very much wanted this strange coincidence to mean something, but I think all it means is people really love this fucking song.
England is For White People
Though it’s not a secret that Clapton went on an unhinged, racist rant during a 1976 concert in Birmingham, it is a surprisingly overlooked detail about his life. People misuse “rant” all the time these days, but in this case it is the only appropriate word. Look at this:
I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man. I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans and fucking… don’t belong here, we don’t want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. We are a white country. I don’t want fucking wogs living next to me with their standards. This is Great Britain, a white country. What is happening to us, for fuck’s sake?
In one of several non-apologies he offered in the aftermath, he reminded interviewers that his parents had abandoned him as a child (true, but irrelevant), explained that he was drunk and high (definitely true), and also enraged about a Saudi man who had groped Pattie Boyd before the show (impossible to verify). This is more than your local drunk blurting a racial slur; it’s the kind of artisanal handcrafted racism that makes one check Urban Dictionary just to know what the hell he’s talking about. Those thoughts don’t just surface accidentally.
The closest he ever came to apologizing was to say he was ashamed of himself for who he was then, “a kind of semi-racist.” He would go on to add, semi-racistly, “Half of my friends were black, I dated a black woman, and I championed black music.”
It's been 43 years since he proudly endorsed a far-right politician running on a racist platform. Surely a man can change and grow over time. Also he’s sober now. The thing is, this incident occurred just two years after “I Shot the Sheriff.” Later in that same concert, he played Bob Marley’s music without any reservations, and his fans applauded. He mimicked black American bluesmen all night, and in the crowd they shrieked with joy. Clapton owes his entire career to black music. That this hypocrisy has been noted frequently doesn’t make it any less true or damning.
A Complete Purist
Describing his nascent career, Clapton says, “In those days I was a complete purist… If it wasn’t black music, it was rubbish.” He left the Yardbirds and the Bluesbreakers because neither was serious enough about playing true blues. He obsessed over Robert Johnson recordings, and in every interview he referenced obscure bluesmen, like everyone’s worst grad school boyfriend. In the late ‘60s, he embraced heavy drug use and drifted away from blues purity, producing arguably his most interesting work with Cream. By 1974, he was successful, but desperate to break through to a new level of fame.
By this time, reggae had gained a small foothold in England, thanks largely to a growing Caribbean population. In 1972, Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” became the first reggae song to hit #1 in the US (peaking at #5 in the UK). Clapton understood that recording a Bob Marley song could be the crossover hit he needed, and, as a student of the blues, he also understood that one of the surest paths to fame is to steal work from black artists and make it about twenty percent worse. After recording a demo, he called Marley to ask about the song’s true meaning. “I couldn’t understand much of his reply. I was just relieved that he liked what we had done," he later said. This is the only record we have of that conversation. The thing we can know for sure is that it did not bother him that he had no sense of what the song is really about (Marley later claimed in an interview that it is about “the elements of wickedness.”)
Without Even Thinking
Here are some more unfortunate things Eric Clapton has said about race:
In response to a scathing letter in NME that denounced him for his racist speech and called for the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement: “I thought it was quite funny actually. I don't know much about politics. I don't even know if it would be good or bad for him to get in. I don't even know who the Prime Minister is now.”
Rolling Stone, 1968: “Everybody and his brother in England still sort of think that spades have big dicks. And Jimi came over and exploited that to the limit, the fucking tee. Everybody fell for it. Shit. I fell for it.”
Quoted in Ray Coleman’s 1986 book Clapton!: “I don’t think Enoch Powell is a racist. I don’t think he cares about color of any kind. His whole idea is for us to stop being unfair to immigrants because it’s getting out of order.”
Guitar Player magazine, 1994: “[I feel] qualified to sing the blues because of what has happened to me, but I still don’t think I’ll ever do it as good as a black man… [for me] it takes a great deal of studying and discipline to sing the blues… for a black guy from Mississippi, it seems to be what they do when they open their mouth—without even thinking.”
Bitchin’
The first time I listened to blues music was when I was seventeen and hanging out in a local dirtbag’s basement apartment. He was twenty-four and dated high school girls, and he always had a fridge full of beer. He didn’t let anyone else play pool on his table, but he allowed us to watch him occasionally succeed at trick shots. His six-disc CD player was loaded with British blues: Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Snowy White, The Moody Blues. The only American band he deigned to play was The Allman Brothers Band (as he air guitared the opening riff of “Whipping Post,” we tried to teach ourselves to like the taste of beer, and then agreed with him when he asked, repeatedly, if this song wasn’t the most bitchin’ thing we’d ever heard). More than anything else, he played Clapton. He said Clapton was God often enough and with enough zeal that we believed him.
For me, the appeal to this music was a feeling of authenticity, the sense that I had been clued in to something more real and raw than the pop rock of our era: Creed, Days Of The New, 3 Doors Down. At seventeen, nothing was more important to me than believing my tastes were original and refined. I didn’t like the dirtbag or his friends or the beer, but I liked that I could sit in the corner of his smoky basement and nod along with “I Feel Free,” as if it meant anything to me, as if it weren’t a copy of a copy (Sonny Boy Williamson famously saying, “These Englishmen want to play the blues so bad . . . and they play it so bad”).
Later, I would download as much Clapton as I could through Limewire and Kazaa and feature him prominently on my BBQ Mix CDs, a playlist I tinkered with for so long that a friend jokes it is my true life’s work. Later, I would spend unfathomable amounts of money to see Buddy Guy at the House of Blues, and to see John Lee Hooker Jr. at an overpriced club in Philly called Warmdaddy’s, where the clientele is mostly 55-year-old white guys who dress like Philosophy professors, and where the catfish is so bad the waiters warn everyone not to order it.
Later, I would realize that in my pursuit of authenticity, I was embracing a caricature of overeducated white guys who think that because they tap their feet along to Muddy Waters, they understand anything about the world those songs came from.
The Way to Heaven
Sample YouTube comments on live performances of “I Shot the Sheriff:”
I personally like both versions. Funny story regarding the song. My whole life I've only heard the Bob Marley rendition. Me and a coworker where in my car and this song came up on my iPad(Bob's version) I am black and he is white mind you. So he was like oh I like this song and I was like me too one of my favorite Bob Marley songs. And he was like what no this is one of my favorite Eric Clapton songs. We both were enlightened that day; he played me the Clapton version it was different but I liked it. It depends on what your ears are used to, but Open your ears and really listen people. Music is universal if it is good than it is good regardless of who sang it. That's my 2 cents.
I love Eric Clapton, obviously in this the crowd did not seem the same appreciation, at Hyde Park - London, they just did not seem to get in the mood. but you have to keep a sniff of the Bob Marley in there to make it work, after all it was his song to start with, anyways enjoy all what ever group you choose, it always nice to have freedom of choice, YES :-)
It was funny seeing all the older people yelling Cocaine while he was singing it....being 22 it was pretty funny...i was smoking a blunt sitting side stage. Ahhh memories...
THIS IS HOW THE WAY TO HEAVEN SOUNDS
Good Country People
This week, while browsing the home decor section of my local Target, I swear “I Shot the Sheriff” started playing over the speakers. As Clapton sang about Sheriff John Brown, I was standing in front of a display of farmhouse-style home goods manufactured to look charmingly rustic. I was looking at the Hearth & Hand collection created by Chip and Joanna Gaines, HGTV’s premier shiplap and sliding barn door enthusiasts. There is nothing specifically offensive about this collection, unless you (like me) are annoyed by banalities like, “see the good,” and, “courage is contagious” scrawled in cursive across mugs and throw pillows. Thanks to HGTV’s spate of rural and exurban house-flipping shows (and also to a cultural pathology that has convinced millions that the only way to be a true American is to live in a small town), farmhouse style has become the dominant design mode of the suburbs. All across my suburban New Jersey neighborhood, people who have never lived in or near a farmhouse have filled their homes with the sort of trinkets and knick-knacks that you used to only see at the Cracker Barrel.
We live in a mason jar based economy now, is what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is: the whole farmhouse aesthetic is just another symptom of the sickness in our culture that has us endlessly refinishing the surfaces of things to convince ourselves that we are in touch with something authentic and real.
What I’m saying is: Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff” is music for the person who has brunch at the trendy southern comfort food restaurant in the part of town they call “sketchy” & after their third mimosa they practice their rudimentary Spanish on the waitress & then later goes to Target to buy a tank top that says “Yoga & Gangster Rap” + a washboard that’s been distressed to look “vintage” & then brings them back to their recently flipped house in their recently gentrified neighborhood, where half the houses have added a wheelbarrow or some shit to the backyard so they can look more convincingly like a home that was once occupied by real humans with real roots.
What I’m saying is: this song is basically fine. But it’s fine in the worst possible way.
Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower's Handbook, as well as the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. He is the co-host of the weekly podcast, Book Fight!, and nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse. He teaches at Temple University and lives in New Jersey. He is on Twitter at @t_mcallister.