Which figures from Billy Joel song ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ are still alive?
It was the last time New Jersey songsmith Billy Joel unleashed a bona fide, canonical hit.
He’d still have successes, the last pop album River of Dreams topping the Billboard 200 in 1993, but ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ would stand as Joel’s final classic single, helping propel Storm Front to chart domination. Commercial conquer doesn’t marry with critical esteem nearly 40 years later, however, the pop rock whirlwind, likened to a “dentist drill” by the man himself, and most longtime fans deeming the disposable cut unable to hold a candle to the gems of his earlier songbook.
Reportedly, the germ of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ was first sparked after meeting a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon’s in the studio, lamenting on the supposedly rotten time it was to be a young adult in the late 1980s. “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems, and everything seemed to be awful,” Joel stated in solidarity. The friend allegedly scoffed in response, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the ‘50s, and everybody knows that nothing happened in the ‘50s.”
Joel took minor offence. Aghast at the idea that his 1950s childhood was event-free, and further fuelled by the ruminative cusp of turning 40, Joel jotted down a lyrically hectic roll-call of mid-20th-century drama across the cultural, political, and scientific landscape between his birth in 1949 and 1989, the year Storm Front was dropped. Released two months before the Berlin Wall’s fall, ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ would inadvertently score the Cold War’s final throes, the 40-year carousel Joel lyrically whizzes through, imbued with a retrospective energy seemingly closing a door to one social chapter and looking toward a new global era after the USSR’s collapse.
He didn’t mean it, and he’s always been candid about the song’s disposability, but Joel does lapse into an annoying Boomer trend of holding their generation’s cultural high points, dramatic struggles, and feats of endeavour as being innately fascinating to younger audiences. ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ is indeed an irksome number, obliviously galumphing through its lyrical shopping list, terribly enamoured with the essentiality of the Boomer’s time on Earth, and thinking such indulgence is enough to sustain a song.
Still, despite ageing like milk, ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ stormed the Hot 100 and is a fairly dead cert in his live repertoire, played as recently as 2025. Since its 1989 drop, the rapid-fire pop history lesson from Joseph Stalin to Beatlemania naturally has found many of the song’s living lyrical namechecks dwindling as the decades roll by.
So who’s still around?
With French actor and singer Brigitte Bardot’s recent passing, only three of the ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ cast gallery are still walking this Earth, nearly 40 years since its release.
Nestled between the Stranger in a Strange Land sci-fi novel and Berlin’s geopolitical drama, folk icon Bob Dylan enjoys a venerable mention, a soldiering songsmith still going to this day, touching 85 years old. Born only several months later, famed rock and roll singer and dancer Chubby Checker finds himself one of the last remaining figures of 1950s pop, lyrically honoured with assassinated president JFK and Alfred Hitchcock’s killer thriller Psycho on either side.
On a more sombre note, in the middle of the crack epidemic and the East Coast syringe tide, the infamous Bernie Goetz gets a mention. Still living in his Manhattan apartment at 78 years old, a few blocks from the site of his notoriety, Goetz found himself at the centre of a national crime furore after shooting four black youths in the subway following an alleged robbery, prompting fierce debate on the country’s race relations, no less pertinent in the age of George Floyd and BLM.
And before you ask, U-2 isn’t a nod to the Irish rock group, but rather the spyplane shot down by Soviet Air Defence while conducting aerial reconnaissance over Russia in 1960, resulting in the capture of American pilot Francis Gary Powers and causing much embarrassment to the US in the midst of the Cold War’s febrile international stage.
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