This Billy Joel song is from his album that marked the beginning of his decline, no longer cranking out masterpieces, and this song has always annoyed the bejeezus out of me.
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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Bob Dylan, Chubby Checker, Bernhard Goetz
Ages 84, 84, and 78, respectively.
Bernhard Goetz
First time I heard him called Bernhard...
Yeah, Bernie Goetz
I''ve been thinking about Bernie Goetz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x60V0eayiAY
Doomtree - 38 airweight
In order of the FMK game, I assume?
Bob Dylan probably doesn't have long, lol
That's wild, I could've sworn he was dead already.
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Did any of those 3 people start the fire?
Damn it, every time I think I have an original thought...
Also Brigitte Bardot is a racist pos. People, especially media, want to gloss over that because she was hot. Same with how Coco Chanel still gets venerated.
HP Lovecraft racist or rich white woman born in the 30s racist?
Marrying the advisor of Jean-Marie Le Pen ( leader of Front Nationale a far-right French political party) type of racist. Plus she called Marie le Pen (daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and also a fascist) the Joan of Arc of the 21st century in an interview.
i mean if she lights the pyre
HP Lovecraft racist or rich white woman born in the 30s racist?
That's literally the same racism, when do you think HP Lovecraft was living/writing...?
Also, we gotta stop giving old people passes. They have the ability to change, they just choose to be bigots. My 90+ year old grandma wholeheartedly embraces my trans friends even if she doesn't fully understand how or why "Robert" became "Annalise", and she had never interacted with a trans person in her life before then.
Brigitte Bardot was just a racist, xenophobic bitter POS until the end.
Lovecraft's racism was born and fuelled out of fear of the unknown. Bardot's racism is more of the common hate-kind.
Uber-racist (and homophobe, anti-feminist, etc...)
She would have been a great asset in the Trump administration
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The song also mentions the Beatles, and I'm sure there's at least one Belgian still in the Congo.
It mentions Beatlemania, which I think we can safely say has died.
And you'd need two Belgians in the Congo.
Any troubles in the Suez still?
Has the boat gotten stuck again?
The article is light on detail. No actual list of who's in the song.
Here's the full list of 119 references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_references_in_We_Didn%27t_Start_the_Fire
I wish the Fall Out Boy update to the song was good.
In Bo Burnham fan circles people joked that That Funny Feeling from Inside is the truer generational update to We Didn't Start the Fire 🥲
That's... entirely correct. Jesus.
What's your issue with it?
I didn't realize the Fall Out Boy version existed before this comment and streamed it. It sounds fairly good, about what I'd expect from a Fall Out Boy update
The selection of items seems weaker to me, but for me the main sin is that the original is basically chronological, which makes it more impressive that it's a coherent song at all, if a bit overrated and very boomerific. Fallout Boy one just throws shit in at random to make the lines scan and rhyme, so it's very "meh" even as a follow-up. It feels like they kind of didn't understand that the original was a survey of the time period.
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this might be one of the most mildly interestings things ive ever read
Well... since "we" could be interpreted to include Billy Joel and the listener... that's two more!
I think including the listener is stretching it. I think it's pretty straightforward that "we" refers to Billy Joel's generation.
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Holy shit, Chubby Checker is still alive? Wow!
15 years ago he was in the news suing because someone put out a smartphone app named “Chubby Checker” and that’s was not the sort of association he wanted to his name. 😉
15 years ago... smartphone app... 
Holy shit, a Fire Punch meme on Lemmy. (read Fire Punch, everyone)
I mean some of them weren’t alive even when the song came out.
I know mashups are pretty tired but I always wanted to hear a mashup of "We Didn't Start the Fire" and Prodigy's "Firestarter".
Only three people listed in the song are still alive: Bob Dylan, Chubby Checker, and Bernhard Goetz.
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