R.E.M. and Billy Joel go Head-to-Head in a Generational Battle for the Apocalypse, featuring Blondie and Mos Def
In Chuck Klosterman’s seminal profile of Billy Joel, he quotes Joel as saying,
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 time
And I love Billy Joel.
But 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,
If he wanted to be a humble tunesmith — a ‘piano man,’ if you will — he would be a lot better off. But he’s not content with that. He wants something grander. And that pretentious side infects not only his bad and mediocre work, but also his best work.
I don’t think Billy Joel is pretentious in the way we usually think of pretentiousness.
Lyrically he sings about every day characters, often struggling with the challenges of love in the modern world.
But there is a definition of pretentious that emphasizes culture, i.e., expressing greater culture than one actually possesses.
And 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”.
Disaster Porn in the Late 90s
The time was the late 1990s. We were nearing the year 2000, and it turned out that our collective conscious couldn’t really wrap our head around that idea. 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. That, or we would all have flying cars.
It was also getting increasingly difficult to reconcile the fact that forces seemingly within, (driving a car, using plastic bags) and definitely outside,
(large-scale corporate burning of fossil fuels) our control, were heating our planet to death.
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.
Dante’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. 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. To see it done out in the open, so unapologetically and on such a large scale, is almost dizzying.
All 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”. 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.
2 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.
Billy Joel and Michael Stipe Were Just 10 Years Early
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. A small discrepancy.
And 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. Even past foreboding to, “oh shit, it’s happening right now“.
For example, Joel’s chart-topping chorus starts with, “we didn’t start the fire”.
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?”
It’s taken for granted that the “world is burning”.
I think that’s why my brain has always paired these songs together at a subconscious level.
More interesting than some weird connection in my brain that insists these songs share similar subject matter, the importance of “Fine” and “Fire” go beyond their chart success, to show us how different generations looked at the end of the world near the end of the last millennia.
Baby Boomers vs Generation X
This Just In!
Baby Boomers and Generation-X Reach Historic Agreement: Shit’s Fucked Up!
At the end of the 1980s shit was either burning before we got here (classic, blameless boomer mentality) or it’s ending now and we feel fine about it (classic, detached gen-x mentality).
Taking a step back, it’s almost eerie how well these two songs line up with the broader public perception of each of their generations.
Billy Joel is the standard Baby Boomer, claiming no responsibility for a world already on fire.
“We didn’t light it/ but we tried to fight” is the closest Baby Boomers come to mustering a non-apology for literally bringing the world to the brink of world-wide fires in the form of global warming.
Sure, the earth’s temperature was on the rise before Baby Boomers, and a lot of what caused later rises in temperature were from pollution (and decisions) emitted long before they were born, but the temperature still rose more during the Baby Boomers’ reign than during any previous generation in our recorded history of global temperatures.
Remember, boomers (b.1946-1964) were coming of age from the early 60s through the 1980’s:
REM on the other hand, takes the very healthy, hands off approach of disavowing any feelings whatsoever.
Basically, Generation X’s answer to the selfishness of the world (as Stipe says it, “world serves its own needs, don’t mis-serve your own needs”) is to mock it, which is exactly the type of stunted adult/late teenager mentality Gen-X would become, perhaps unfairly, famous for.
See how Stipe ends the first verse with, “feeling pretty psyched”. This is a verse filled with warmongering and patrioric vigor, vigor that is broken down into psychobabble bursts of verbs and adjectives (“vitrioloic, patriotic, slam fight, bright, light”), and and a verse capped off with a sarcastic agreement.
For the moment, I won’t hold all of the Baby Boom generation responsible for Billy Joel’s lazy writing,
It is, however, interesting that R.E.M. are able to pepper in irony, sarcasm and even humor into a song about the end of the world, where the only value, the only real point Joel’s song promotes is “it’s not our fault”.
It is also very telling that Generation X uses “I” throughout it’s meditation on earth death, while the Baby Boomer’s version uses “we”.
At least the Boomers thought of themselves as a collective?
Before we get into breaking down which song is more artistically successful and ultimately better at dealing with the existential angst of the world ending, let’s look at their oddly similar song structures.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Bridges
Breaking down the structure of the end of the world
Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus. Coda. And the Coda is really just a chorus repeated over and over until the song ends.
Both REM’s and Joel’s songs share a similar structure, neither song has a bridge.
Bridges are almost a necessity for radio play (granted, “End of the World” breaks down around the 3 minute mark, but musically that breakdown is just the chorus with less instruments).
In layman’s term the bridge is the part of the song that’s the most different from the rest of the song.
The bridge can come in at a lot of different places: after the second chorus (arguably the most popular place), before the second chorus, before or after the first chorus, in the middle of the second verse…
It gets a little confusing, but the point is that the bridge tends to break up the song, giving our ears a rest, before bringing us back. It’s the “woah, wo-ooah, oh-oh-oh” part of “Shallow”.
In both Joel’s and R.E.M.’s songs, the idea of the world ending never leaves the listeners ears. Musically, we are spared no such comfort. Our anxiety is never let off the hook. The end of the world is here and there’s no escaping it.
And the verses…
We’ll give these 2 songs the benefit of the doubt and say they are “being influenced” by rap and leave it at that. Mostly because, again, I like both of these songs.
But I can imagine loving hip hop in 1987 and 1989, when hip hop is just beginning to disrobe the albatross of “not music” from around its neck, and then hearing two of the whitest singers profiting mightily from music that seems to share a very similar vocal approach to Hip Hop verses, vocal approaches that neither singer had ever done before or would ever do again.
Still…both songs are better than Blondie. (I love you Blondie, but this take is nothing new).
At the end of they day, Michael Stipe and Billy Joel pull off their verse melodies really well.
It is notable that they both chose to talk about the end of the world in wordy, lyric-driven, dense, (yes) rap-like verses.
Almost as though there’s a lot to discuss and little time to do it.
Almost as though these songs are actually anxiety about Rock n’ Roll coming to an end in the face of the rapidly rising force of Hip Hop, and are using the form of Rock’s usurper to describe Rock’s very own usurpation.
Why Stipe is Better
With all that said, here’s where Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” seems like a cheap rip off of “It’s The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”.
Michael Stipe fluctuates between rapid adjectives and bold statements of subjective truth, also known as “opinions”.
Stipe does the High/Low thing really well: 3 seemingly mundane nouns next to some insightful, complex comment on culture.
Billy Joel literally just lists things. He just says the name of 100 things and very rarely interjects any kind of position or stance.
Stipe:
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake
Birds and snakes, and aeroplanes
And Lenny Bruce is not afraid
Joel:
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
Now, Joel will use phrases like “South Pacific” or “Brooklyn’s got a winning team” that has deeper connotations for his generation, and for American history, in general. But that’s about as contextual as he gets. He adds almost nothing of substance to his nostalgia porn list. It’s as though Joel wants listeners to go, “oh yea, I remember Studebaker’s…huh”.
Stipe almost starts with just-a-list-of-things, but then adds an opinion, an angle, some subjectivity, some wit.
“Lenny Bruce is not afraid” is a reference to Lenny Bruce’s battles against Congress for his 1st Amendment rights. An arguably self-destructive battle that left him broke, mentally and monetarily, but one that is still cited as an important foundational step for stand-up comedy as we know it.
Notice, Stipe doesn’t say “Lenny Bruce goes to congress” or even just “Lenny Bruce” as this event may have been memorialized by Billy Joel. Stipe takes a position by saying that Bruce “is not afraid”.
Stipe, again:
Light a candle, light a motive, step down, step down
Watch your heel crush, crush, uh oh
This means no fear, cavalier, renegade and steering clear
A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline
Here we see Stipe again, using the list form to subvert our expectations right at the end, while giving us what may be the siren call of his generation,
“Offer me solution, offer me alternatives and I decline”
By listing verbs like “light”, “step”, and “crush” next to war imagery “fear”, “cavalier”, and “renegade” Stipe gives the listener a feeling of being pressed down upon, of aggression, of a line being crossed in the sand.
After this build up, Stipe then releases the tension with an easy-on-the-ears repetition, “a tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies”.
This line is long and open enough for the listener to hear the words clearly, hear them again (a confirmation), take a second to breathe, and then prepare to digest what comes next: an ending which masterfully puts forth Stipes’ most impactful cultural commentary, “offer me solution, offer me alternatives and I decline”.
Stipe is acknowledging the fact that his generation is complaining while not having an answer themselves.
Billy Joel does not comment on the fact that his generation doesn’t have any answers. He just says his generation doesn’t have any answers, over and over again, and then goes on to list all the reasons the burning world, and Baby Boomer’s lack of answers on how to deal with it, are not their fault: because all the things that happened in the 20th century. Of course.
Now list poetry can be really interesting. Mos Def dabbles in and out of the form perfectly in “Mathematics”.
List poetry can gain power by placing unlike things near each other, or by listing several similar things followed by a dissimilar thing, the last thing putting all previous things in a new and different light.
Joel doesn’t appear to be doing any of that in “Fire”.
Only twice does Joel add in some sort of context, some sort of statement, outside of the chorus.
He says “I can’t take it anymore” at the end of his last verse and “what else do I have to say” at the end of his second to last verse.
Proper nouns (i.e., the actual name of a person, place, or thing ,e.g., Marilyn Monroe, Empire State Building), are very powerful because they bring with them all the associated feelings of the person, place or thing you’re naming.
But when used the way Joel does here, placed next to each other over and over without any breaks or ironic juxtaposition, they begin to lose all weight and importance.
At times Joel almost makes it fun, at times he almost makes us feel as though, by putting two unlike things next to each other, he’s somehow making a statement on them.
“Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania”
See, that’s kind of fun? I guess? One is a movie and the other is a cultural event and they both kind of happened around the same time?
Proper nouns need to be broken up with commentary/opinions/points of view (the way Stipe does), and if not, need to be meticulously placed next to each other so that each reference builds upon its predecessor in an interesting way.
By just listing things, Joel uses proper nouns to the point they lose all meaning. To the point they lose all meaning. To the point they lose all meaning. To the point they lose all meaning. To the point they lose all meaning.
It’s The End of This Article As We Know It
Musically, I really enjoy listening to both songs, but Stipe is the better writer.
While at times his lyrics a bit disjointed or idiosyncratic, at least in those moments he’s taking risks. And even when he’s a bit all over the map lyrically, his syllables still sound good over the music.
Billy Joel, with “Fire” has created the lyrical equivalent of semantic satiation.
And it’s still catchy, and I still like hearing it, but if we had to put one generations’ interpretation of the end of the world, against another’s, I have to give the win to Generation X.
Both songs do a creepy good job of summarizing their generations stance on social-political issues and how those ethos stand up against the psychic strain of an oncoming apocalypse, for better or worse. Both songs express their points in an tight-knit rhyme scheme influenced by Hip Hop. Both are anthemic. But Stipe’s more emotionally complicated and politically nuanced lyrics are what make “It’s The End of The World” a stronger piece of pop culture art.
I guess, instead of a few hundred words, I could’ve boiled this argument down to which song memorializes JFK’s assassination better: the song that doesn’t mention it at all or the song that says, “JFK, blown away”.