I
was listening to music this afternoon, when I started listening to a song by
Billy Joel, entitled We Didn’t Start the Fire. It had a catchy tune and interesting lyrics. But after listening to
the song, I wanted to know more about it, and what the meaning of the song is.
According
to one website I went to, the lyrics are “a stream of consciousness list of
events” that Joel believed his generation shouldn’t have been blamed for. In
the chorus, when he says, “we didn’t start the fire,” he’s saying that all of
the societal issues going on during that time weren’t caused by his generation.
The phrase, “it was always burning since the world’s been turning” states that
these issues were already in place before Joel’s generation was born. Finally,
he says, “ but we tried to fight it” to show that although his generation
wasn’t the cause of all the social turmoil, they did try to stop it.
This
song was very interesting to me because it made me start to realize that issues
in our society today might be blamed on my own generation by the time we become
adults. Although these issues might not be our faults, we will have to take on
the burden of taking blame for them as well as fixing them. Issues like
immigration, poverty, and laws on gay marriage will become our problems to fix.
It’s quite daunting to think about.
Why
are different generations blamed for all of the things that went wrong in our
country? Will this happen to our own generation?
I remember hearing this song in Junior high (It's impossible to forget) but I never thought about it in a critical way. I think Billy Joel was arguing against the tendency to blame youth, and attribute complex events to a certain group of people. He says instead that things like that are human nature, and that any generation would have done the same in the situation.
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