Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire (Official HD Video)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Mostly used as a passing reference or joke in threads about social problems being inherited from earlier generations.
What it is
The official music video for Billy Joel's 1989 song We Didn't Start the Fire, a rapid-fire list of historical events.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2018 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Cites TangoTrotFox · 2018-04 · on “Young Japanese are surprisingly content”
> "Ask people in their 20s and 30s what they think about the world, and over half of them will say the world's going to shit in one way or another. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum that will say that. This isn't a good sign for society." Do you know the song, "We didn't Start the Fire"? [1] Great song. It was released in 1989 - check out the lyrics. Even more interesting though is why the song was written. [2] Billy Joel was in a recording studio talking to a friend of John Lennon's son, who was 21 at the time. They had a conversation: - Friend: It's a terrible time to be 21 [because the world's going to shit] - Billy Joel: Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it w
Cites somenameforme · 2022-05 · on “Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]”
Consider the early 20th century. Some ostensibly irrelevant political figure was assassinated which rapidly spiraled into the "war to end all wars" in which about 20 million people were killed, in a world population of 1.7 billion - so more than 1% of people. In relatively short order this led to the Great Depression in which over 10 years the global economy collapsed leading to mass suicide, starvation, and disorder. And we were just warming up. After that it turns out that the war to end all wars was just the pregame show. An eccentric vegetarian artist with a knack for riling up crowds decided to declare a literal genocidal war on the world, and for some time it looked very much like he w