It’s taken for granted that the “world is burning”. Not, “we all agree there’s an insane fire going on right now, right? And it’s always been going on? There’s always been this insane fire going on since as far as everyone remembers, right?” Even past foreboding to, “oh shit, it’s happening right now “.įor example, Joel’s chart-topping chorus starts with, “we didn’t start the fire”. A small discrepancy.Īnd while Joel doesn’t explicitly say something like “it’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine”, his chorus feels extremely foreboding.
Now, unlike the movies above (each one released in the same year as it’s doppelganger), R.E.M.’s song “It’s The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” (1987) and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” (1989) were released 2 years apart. Billy Joel and Michael Stipe Were Just 10 Years Early Besides my true enjoyment of each of these songs, “It’s The End of the World” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, they hold this same, awe-struck place in my creative heart as the disaster porn of the late 1990s.Ģ years before Billy Joel made a song about listing everything that happened in the 20th century, and almost 10 years before Hollywood would sell these fears to us on a broader scale, R.E.M released “It’s The End of the World” which also took a meta-level look at our culture as we neared the turn of the millenia. To see it done out in the open, so unapologetically and on such a large scale, is almost dizzying.Īll 6 of these movies were about severe natural disasters, and the most successful one ( Armageddon) specifically threatened to be the “end of the world as we know it”. As a writer I try not to write the same idea someone else has written, especially if I can’t take a new spin on it. With a trailer like this, I have no idea how Twister managed to lurch out of Tornado!’s long cultural shadowĭante’s Peak (1997) and Volcano (1997), Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998), and of course, Twister (1996) and Tornado! (1996) are all pieces of pop-art unleashed on the mainstream at the same time, about the same subject matter, which is a phenomena I deeply, unnervingly enjoy. So because we were facing the heat death of the only planet we’ve known AND there were no flying cars in 1996, we sought out the next best thing, natural disaster porn.
(large-scale corporate burning of fossil fuels) our control, were heating our planet to death. It was also getting increasingly difficult to reconcile the fact that forces seemingly within, (driving a car, using plastic bags) and definitely outside, Everything in our popular culture had told us that the year 2000 was such an inconceivably long time away that we’d all be dead by the time it got here. We were nearing the year 2000, and it turned out that our collective conscious couldn’t really wrap our head around that idea. Lyrically he sings about every day characters, often struggling with the challenges of love in the modern world.īut there is a definition of pretentious that emphasizes culture, i.e., expressing greater culture than one actually possesses.Īnd if there is any song that attempts to bowl over it’s listener with it’s sheer quantity of cultural references, it’s Billy Joel’s 1989 song “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. I don’t think Billy Joel is pretentious in the way we usually think of pretentiousness. And that pretentious side infects not only his bad and mediocre work, but also his best work. If he wanted to be a humble tunesmith - a ‘piano man,’ if you will - he would be a lot better off. In the big picture of pop music, I don’t know if what I’ve created is seen as being that important or that necessary, at least not if you ask the experts…Rolling Stone magazine would not say anything positive about me, and they were the tastemakers at the timeīut let’s take a minute to dig into his deepest fear and find out why Robert Christgau, one of those tastemakers Joel calls out, says this about Joel later in Klosterman’s article, In Chuck Klosterman’s seminal profile of Billy Joel, he quotes Joel as saying, and Billy Joel go Head-to-Head in a Generational Battle for the Apocalypse, featuring Blondie and Mos jordansandviig
0 kommentar(er)
