I Didn't Start the Fire (Song Parody)

Yesterday was my 50th birthday. To mark the occasion, I decided to rewrite the lyrics to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" to cover events of the last fifty years. There are five verses, so each one is dedicated to a different decade. (I used Wikipedia to look up key events, people, and things from each decade.) Although I like to rewrite lyrics to songs, this was one of my more challenging projects. Billy Joel manages to make his lyrics work by incorporating internal rhymes into every line. Not all of my lines rhyme that well. The syllable counts for each line don't sound consistent to me, though I could be mishearing them. Perhaps I'll come back to this at some point to tweak a few lines. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this musical trip down Memory Lane.

Earth Day, Watergate, Richard Nixon ain’t so great,

Oil crisis, Gerald Ford, Hawking finds black holes,

Voyager, Pinochet, Bell-Bottoms and World Trade,

Elvis Presley, Happy Days, Alda and Travolta

Saigon falls, Jonestown, Biko, and stagflation

Star Wars, Space Invaders, Dark Side of the Moon

Disco, edit genes, Test tube babies hit the scene

Margaret Thatcher, Mao Zedong, hostages, and Brady Bunch!

(Chorus) We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Lennon shot, Regan lives, Cold War and Gorbachev

Marcos had to go, Pinochet and Truedeau

Rubik’s cube, Madonna, Mario and Pacman

New pope in Rome, ET’s gotta phone home,

Dallas was a dream, Valley Girls reigned supreme,

Michael Jackson, Challenger, Halley’s Comet, Chernobyl,

Apple, MTV, Sarajevo, Tom Hanks

INXS, greed is good, Germans tore a wall down

Chorus

World Wide Web, NAFTA, Bill Clinton, Mandela,

Hubble, GPS, Windows is a big success,

Rodney King, Eurostar, Kuwait and the Gulf War

Dolly Sheep, Warsaw Pack, Rabin and Arafat

Climate change, slacker, Hale-Bopp, Pathfinder

Amazon, Hong Kong, Spice Girls sang their songs

Toy Story, Pokemon, Gen X has flannel on

OJ got away, end it all with Y2K!

Chorus

9-11 don’t forget, Facebook on the Internet

Climate change, anthrax, we all wear cargo pants

Harry Potter, civil wars, Pluto now is a dwarf

Bush, Obama, Merkel too, Come on back, Doctor Who

Housing bubble had to burst, earthquakes did their worst

Sequence genomes mice to men, Avatar and Eminem!

Chorus

2010, Arab Spring, African uprising

Castro, smartphones, hybrid cars and flying drones

Human rights, Endgame, California needs some rain

Chicago Cubs break a curse, White House goes from great to worse

Women march in pussy hats, teenagers on SnapChat

3D printing, iPads, Brexit, The Walking Dead

Fire sweeps a continent, fake news from the government

COVID-19 at my door, I’ll be here for fifty more!

(This last line is meant to be an expression of an indomitable spirit, not hubris.)

Chorus