"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. Your assignment is to

interpret/explain the 20 bolded headline events/people from Billy Joel’s version, then write your

own lyrics from your date of birth to 2021. 

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

Chorus

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac

Sputnik, Zhou Enlai, 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

Chorus

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?

Chorus

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