Editing We Didn't Start the Fire (section)

== History ==
Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of [[Sean Lennon]] who said "It's a terrible time to be 21!". Joel replied: "Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had [[Vietnam War|Vietnam]], and y'know, [[War on drugs|drug problems]], and [[Civil rights movement|civil rights problems]] and everything seemed to be awful". The friend replied: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties". Joel retorted: "Wait a minute, didn't you hear of the [[Korean War]] or the [[Suez Crisis|Suez Canal Crisis]]?" Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.<ref>{{cite magazine |last = Nadboy |first = Arie |title = I am the Edu-Tainer |magazine = Island Ear |date = March 1996 }} Cited by {{harvp|Bordowitz|2006|p= 169}}.</ref>

Joel later criticized the song on strictly musical grounds.<ref name="shades" /><ref name="oxford1994" /><ref>{{cite web |last1=del Rosario |first1=Alexandra |title=Fall Out Boy updated Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire.' Fans say it's 'unhinged' |url=https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-06-29/fall-out-boy-we-didnt-start-the-fire-billy-joel-slammed-cover |website=[[The Los Angeles Times]] |access-date=September 24, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230901024030/https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-06-29/fall-out-boy-we-didnt-start-the-fire-billy-joel-slammed-cover |archive-date=September 1, 2023 |date=June 29, 2023 |url-status=live}}</ref> In 1993, when discussing it with documentary filmmaker David Horn, Joel compared its melodic content unfavorably to his song "[[The Longest Time]]": "Take a song like 'We Didn't Start the Fire'. It's really not much of a song&nbsp;... If you take the melody by itself, terrible. Like a dentist drill."<ref name="shades">{{cite AV media | people=Horn, David (Director) | date=1993 | title=Billy Joel: Shades of Grey | medium=Motion picture | location=New York | publisher=Thirteen/WNET and Maritime Music}}</ref>

When asked if he deliberately intended to chronicle the [[Cold War]] with his song<ref>The song describes events between 1949 (when the Soviet Union detonated [[List of states with nuclear weapons#Statistics and force configuration|their first atomic bomb]]) and 1989 (when the [[Fall of the Berlin Wall|Berlin Wall fell]]).</ref> he responded: "It was just my luck that the [[Soviet Union]] [[Dissolution of the Soviet Union|decided to close down shop]] [soon after putting out the song]", and that this span "had a symmetry to it, it was 40 years" that he had lived through. He was asked if he could do a follow-up about the next couple of years after the events that transpired in the original song, and he commented: "No, I wrote one song already and I don't think it was really that good to begin with, melodically".<ref name="oxford1994">{{Citation |title=Billy Joel - Q&A: Tell Us About "We Didn't Start The Fire"? (Oxford 1994) | date=October 22, 2013 |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx3T8pbDcms |language=en |access-date=January 19, 2023}}</ref>