Billy Joel Referenced 59 Figures in “We Didn’t Start the Fire” — Now Only Three Are Still Living Following Brigitte Bardot’s Death
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She was the last woman still alive among those mentioned in the track.
Brigitte Bardot’s passing marks the loss of the last living woman referenced in a very exclusive club.
With the French actress’ death at age 91, only three of the 59 people mentioned in Billy Joel’s 1989 hit “We Didn’t Start the Fire” remain alive, according to a data visualization shared by a music enthusiast on Reddit’s r/dataisbeautiful. The chart was updated to reflect Bardot’s passing.
Reddit user u/cavedave created the visual, which illustrates the lifespans of everyone named in the song using lines, with a dot marking the moment each person made the impact referenced in the track. “Line starts when someone is born. Ends when they die. And a dot for when they did the thing they were mentioned for in the song,” the creator explained.
The three surviving figures are musicians Bob Dylan and Chubby Checker, along with Bernhard Goetz, who gained notoriety in 1984 after shooting four teenagers on a New York subway, an incident for which he faced charges of murder and criminal possession of a weapon.
Joel has shared that the song was inspired by his love of history. In a 1989 interview with Northeastern University’s Larry Katz, he explained that as he turned 40, “the history teacher in me” emerged. Growing up without television, Joel said he immersed himself in reading and developed a fascination with historical events.
Recalling a conversation with a young man frustrated with contemporary issues like AIDS, crack, and homelessness, Joel said he realized many historical events had been overlooked. “I started jotting down all the names and events I could think of from my 40 years,” he said. “It started looking like a rap song, so I just kept going.”
Despite its enduring popularity, Joel admitted in the 1993 documentary Billy Joel: Shades of Grey that he’s not fond of the track itself. “It’s really not much of a song … If you take the melody by itself, terrible, like a dentist drill,” he told director David Horn.