Social media users adding verses to Billy Joel classic as coronavirus concerns mount
“Flights from Europe banned from map/Sarah Palin tries to rap/They just shut down the NBA/What else do I have to say?”
During national tragedies, certain songs have been elevated in the culture; after 9/11, Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” became the impromptu soundtrack for footage of the World Trade Center rubble and rescue workers. While it’s too early to gauge which pop songs will become the reassuring accompaniment for this unnerving time in the country and around the world, an early contender is “We Didn’t Start the Fire” — more specifically, these unauthorized additions.
It wasn’t quite hip hop — Joel later called the melody “horrendous … like a droning mosquito.” But the song wound up name-dropping political and cultural touchstones from the end of World War II to the end of the Eighties: the Cold War, the blacklist, Elvis, the space race, Disneyland, JFK, up to “Woodstock, Watergate, punk” and the “rock and roller Cola wars.” It was almost a cry for help from someone overwhelmed by the onslaught of news and change in the post-Sixties world.
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