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"We Didn't Start the Fire" is a song by Billy Joel. Its lyrics include brief, rapid-fire allusions to more than 100 headline events between 1949, the year of Joel's birth, and 1989, when the song was released on his album ''Storm Front''. The tune was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. The song was also a No. 1 hit in the US. == History == Joel got the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a friend of Sean Lennon who had just turned 21 who said "It's a terrible time to be 21!" Joel replied to him, "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." 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 Canal Crisis?" Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.〔Rolling Stone magazine - "Billy Joel Starts a Fire" by Sheila Rogers. Retrieved 4 May 2012.〕〔Billy Joel Q&A: Tell Us About 'We Didn't Start The Fire?' University of Oxford, May 5, 1994 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx3T8pbDcms〕 Joel has said, "I'm a history nut. I devour books. At one time I wanted to be a history teacher". According to his mother, he was a bookworm by the age of seven.〔Bordowitz, pp. 168, 161, 9〕 Unlike most of Joel's songs, the lyrics were written before the melody, owing to the somewhat unusual style of the song. The song was a huge commercial success and was Joel's third ''Billboard'' No. 1 hit. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year.〔http://www.rockonthenet.com/archive/1990/grammys.htm〕 Joel has said, "There's an element of malevolence in the song"; it's like waiting for the other shoe to drop.〔 Joel has mixed feelings about the song. "It's a nightmare to perform live, because if I miss one word, it's a train wreck."〔Newman, Melinda "Joel Sees Pop Exit with Greatest Hits 3", Billboard, July 26, 1997; cited in Bordowitz, p.169.〕 He has also called it a "novelty song" that does not "really define me as well as album songs that probably don't get played".〔Nadboy, Arie, "I am the Edu-Tainer", Island Ear, March 1996; cited by Bordowitz, p. 169〕 On being asked if he could do a follow-up about the next couple of years after the events that transpired in the original song, he commented "No, I wrote one song already and I don't think it was really that good to begin with, melodically."〔 ''Blender'' magazine ranked "We Didn't Start the Fire" No. 41 on its list of the "50 Worst Songs Ever", a list that also includes songs from Paul McCartney and Simon & Garfunkel. They considered the production bombastic and stated that the song "resembles a term paper scribbled the night before it’s due."〔Aizlewood,John; Collis, Clark; ''et al.'' (April 1, 2009). (Run for Your Life! It's the 50 Worst Songs Ever! ) ''Blender.com''. Retrieved May 3, 2008. Quoted at () . Retrieved December 20, 2013.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「We Didn't Start the Fire」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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