Tomorrow is the Grammy Award. In 1990 when I was a kid I first watched the show and saw Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire." "Harry Truman, Doris Day... Einstein, James Dean... Malcolm X... Woodstock..." a well-known song as a very direct, and literal, I mean literal, description of American and World's history from 1949-1989.
It might be surely an unique approach for lyrics writing. Sounds rather like a rap song than a pop music. Here I feel not only anger, surprise, irony, wonder, but also a kind of calmness like a document keeper.
I could no more share the emotion toward the history in his song than I do towards Abraham Lincoln because I didn't experience it (and I was too young to understand it). But soon after the 1990 Grammy I was watching the dissolution of Soviet Union on TV. It has passed rapidly changing 20 years of upheaval since then.
Billy, if you write another verse about this 20 years, I think it would be twice the length of the 40 years of the original song.
As a MTV generation actually I was more interested in the video work of this song. It's no easy montage of historical archives. Please take a look because it's really awesome.
"We didn't Start the Fire" Billy Joel, 1989
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