The song begins with events that happened in 1949. You know what happened in 1949 that is not explicitly detailed in the song? BIlly Joel, the writer of the song, was born. Half the stuff in the song happens when Billy Joel was a kid. There wasn’t much of anything he could have done about it. The second half of the song is stuff that happened in his adulthood, and yeah, he and his generation haven’t fixed everything but they’re working on it. They didn’t start the fire! The fire was going before they were born! They’re still fighting it!
He wrote the song because he was talking with a 21 year old (in 1989) and the 21 year old believed that the 80s were uniquely turbulent and chaotic and filled with change, and that life had been slow and stable and nice and “normal” and unchanging until like the 70s.
And that’s just not true.
There has always been cultural change, there has always been conflict from small and insignificant things to major world-shattering things. There have always been tragedies. There have always been stories that break the rules but strike a major chord. There was never a mythical time when everything was calm and stable and there was no injustice, and if you thought there was, it’s because you haven’t looked close enough. That’s the message of the song. The song is about looking at the past clear-eyed, instead of filled with rosy glasses.
And not all of the stuff he names is bad stuff! Some of it is good. Little Rock and the beginning of racial integration in schools, for example. Or the arrest and trial of Adolf Eichmann. Birth control is a definite positive. So is the opening of the Space Program to female astronauts (Sally Ride, you go girl!).
Everything changes. Things fall apart. Stability and “normality” are illusions. Some of the change is good, some of it’s bad, and some of it’s just different. Some of the things that happen are good, some of them bad … and even some of the bad things lead to good outcomes. (For example, political scandals like Watergate that get rotten politicians out of office.)
But it’s not hopeless because things have changed and are changing. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, sometimes neither better nor worse just different. And Billy Joel wants us to look at the past with clear eyes, not rose-tinted nostalgia for “the simple time back when everything was stable and normal.”
