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“Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England’s got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
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
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez
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
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather Homicide, Children of Thalidomide…
Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia
Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo
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
Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician Sex
J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say?
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
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
Ayatollah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China’s under martial law
Rock and Roller Cola wars, I can’t take it anymore
We didn’t start the fire
it was always burning
since the world’s been turning
we didn’t start the fire
but when we are gone
it will still burn on and on and on and on
and on and on and on and on…
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
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
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”.
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Billy Joel, We didn’t start the fire – 4:49
(Billy Joel)
Album: Storm front (1989)
Singolo: “We didn’t start the fire / House of Blue Light” (1989)
Per altri testi, traduzioni e commenti, guarda la discografia completa di Billy Joel.
Per segnalare errori su testi o traduzioni, o semplicemente per suggerimenti, richieste d’aiuto e qualunque altra curiosità, potete scriverci all’indirizzo quality@infinititesti.com.
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Citazioni.
“We Didn’t Start the Fire è un singolo del cantautore statunitense Billy Joel, pubblicato nel 1989 ed estratto dall’album Storm Front. Il testo del brano contiene brevi allusioni ad oltre cento eventi avvenuti tra il 1949, anno di nascita di Billy Joel, ed il 1989, anno di uscita della canzone. La canzone ha ricevuto la candidatura per il Grammy Award alla registrazione dell’anno nel 1990″.
(Wikipedia, voce We Didn’t Start the Fire)
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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. 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. 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. 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. “I had turned forty. It was 1989 and I said “Okay, what’s happened in my life?” I wrote down the year 1949. Okay, Harry Truman was president. Popular singer of the day, Doris Day. China went Communist. Another popular singer, Johnnie Ray. Big Broadway show, South Pacific. Journalist, Walter Winchell. Athlete, Joe DiMaggio. Then I went on to 1950 […]. It’s one of the worst melodies I’ve ever written. I kind of like the lyric though”.
Joel has said, “There’s an element of malevolence in the song; it’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop”. He has mentioned having mixed feelings about the song. “It’s a nightmare to perform live, because if I miss one word, it’s a train wreck”. He has called it a “novelty song” that does not “really define me as well as album songs that probably don’t get played”, and has also criticized the song on strictly musical grounds. In 1993, when discussing it with documentary filmmaker David Horn, Joel compared its melodic content unfavorably to his song “The Longest Time“: “Take a song like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire‘. It’s really not much of a song….If you take the melody by itself, terrible. Like a dentist drill”.
A music video for the single was directed by Chris Blum, which chronicles a white middle-class married couple and their goal of the American Dream: a home, careers, and children. This is symbolised by the constant revamping of a domestic kitchen – 1940s utilitarian turning into 1950s Populuxe, 1960s op art, 1970s earth-colored tiles and macramé, and finally 1980s black lacquer & granite bench tops. This is juxtaposed with symbols of the tumultuous social times of the second half of the 20th century (e.g., bra burning, lynching, and draft-card burning). The singer acts as an unseen but omnipresent observer. During each chorus, Joel wearing sunglasses (similar to Roy Orbison‘s) rhythmically beats on a black table; in the background, famous photographs (of Lee Harvey Oswald‘s assassination and Nguyễn Văn Lém‘s execution, among others) are consumed by fire, a metaphor of the song’s theme and title. The music video on YouTube has over 60 million views as of August 2017.
Though the lyrics are rapid-fire with several people and events mentioned in a single word each, there is widespread agreement on the meaning of the lyrics. Steven Ettinger wrote: “Billy Joel captured the major images, events, and personalities of this half-century in a three-minute song…. It was pure information overload, a song that assumed we knew exactly what he was singing about…What was truly alarming was the realization that we, the listeners, for the most part understood the references”.
(Wikipedia, voce We Didn’t Start the Fire)
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