Brendel: We Didn’t Start the Fire is obviously a hilarious song but we don’t talk enough about the line “cola wars I CANT TAKE IT ANYMORE”, like was that the straw that broke the camels back for you my man?

We Didn’t Start the Fire is obviously a hilarious song but we don’t talk enough about the line “cola wars I CANT TAKE IT ANYMORE”, like was that the straw that broke the camels back for you my man?

maybe they're talking about Coca Cola hiring paramilitaries to kill labor organizers, in which case I get it

😨 www.pbs.org/frontlinewor....

FRONTLINE/WORLD Fellows . Colombia: The Coca-Cola Controversy . PBSwww.pbs.org

I assure you, they are not.

People forget what it was like, these guys were on every street corner.

Frightening children, yelling slurs at passing cars.

It's like when you've had a terrible day and your jacket gets caught on the door handle, a tiny annoyance, but you finally lose your shit.

Scene: Billy Joel in the Soda aisle in the grocery store having a mental breakdown trying to chose between New Coke and Pepsi.

Maybe I’m just a moron, but there’s such a wide range of topics in that song that I just think of it as 🎶 here are some things that happened 🎶

Look, I appreciate the rhyming effort and the fairly tight adherence to chronological order. I get that it’s Boomer whingeing, but it has its merits. As a GenX’er, the Fall Out Boy “throw a bunch of events from the last 30 years into a similar rhythmic structure” is weaksauce.

I have painful memories from when the song was new of explaining to coworkers that it was “Zhou Enlai”, not “Joe ‘N’ I” and then having to explain who Zhou Enlai *was*.

9 year old me heard “trouble in the Suez” and wondered what was wrong with America’s sewers in the mid 50s. Like, I pictured alligators living in them.

Another common mishearing among my age cohort was “stockbroker homicide” for “Starkweather homicides”. GenX’ers who weren’t fans of the national pastime also wondered about the significance of “California baseball”.

“Honestly, dude, before the mid-late Fifties, MLB just didn’t happen west of the Mississippi.” “But what about the Los Ang…” “Have a seat.”

The event that made Bernie Sanders a socialist

I wonder how "The Wii didn't start the fire" has aged

Don’t forget “JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say?” followed by him saying a lot more things.

mildly curious to know what phase of drunk/dry/decline/comeback oscillation Billy was on when he penned that one

BRITISH POLITICIAN SEX

CALIFORNIA BASEBALL I mean…

super hilarious side note: my 7th grade social studies teacher assigned each member of my class to research a line from that song to report on its meaning/context... as a "history lesson"

Yep. I was a librarian when that song came out, and we had kids coming in but the dozens to research that for class.

Were there visual aids? History…

nah, we just had to write up & orally present our findings to the class, and bite down the "this is dumb af" 🙄 jeering that circulated about the whole thing, lowkey

Did that happen in the Eisenhower Backseat? The whole song is just a list of shit — important and not — that doesn’t add up to anything or tell you one time was any crazier than another.

The album came out in 1989, so it was after he fired his manager for cooking the books and while he was turning 40, after someone at age 21 was saying their generation had it rough. Not sure if that info helps, I'm not too familiar and had to look the album up on Wikipedia.

ty ty

New Coke was pretty bad...

arguably, the national hysteria over its introduction was worse. how i interpret that line: masses of people become enraged at the stupidest thing

I don’t know, Breyers replaced their lactose-free chocolate ice cream with a different recipe, taking away the only ice cream my daughter liked and could eat, and now after nearly 50 years of eating their ice cream, I consider them dead to me. YMMV

ok, but in this case, you could always drink pepsi and not actually notice any difference

The Coca-Cola Wars: Can Anybody Really Tell the Difference? - JSTOR Dailydaily.jstor.org While few people can reliably discern any difference in a blind taste test, Coca-Cola is winning in its branding war with Pepsi.

I’ve actually done that blind taste test, and guess what.

Dude it was sugar water that was practically indistinguishable from the other brands of sugar water already on the market. Having an opinion on it is embarrassing.

they were *rock and roller* cola wars, it was a very dark time

I always thought this line referred to escalating celebrity endorsements (not New Coke vs Classic). I remember the fanfare around Michael Jackson’s Pepsi commercials

Oh definitely—though “rock and roller” is a stretch, it’s not like Pepsi had Prince and Coke had Springsteen or something.

To be as generous as possible to Mr. Joel’s 8th-most-annoying song, it seems like synecdoche for the whole Boomer Sellout thing—not quite The Clash singing about turning rebellion into money, but not *not* that either.

Diet Coke had George Michael and in this case since rock and roll had ceased to mean anything by the 1980s Billy Joel included two pop stars. Easier to sing?

Dearest Martha, I write to you from the front lines. I have seen horrors no man ought see. A fortnight ago we lost seven men in an ambush. They never saw it coming, because it was clear. Clear as crystal they say. Pepsi's new weapon may signal the end of this war.

Like Tom Petty saying "Take back Vanessa Redgrave" What'd she ever do to you, dude?

According to Tom, you need to ask Bob Dylan. americansongwriter.com/the-meaning-...

Any song that’s just Boomer nostalgia bullshit like We Didn’t Start The Fire and Jack and Diane makes my ears bleed and should be put on the trash heap of music history.

“Suckin’ on chili dogs” is pure art!

m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QX5...

Jack and Diane but most of the lyrics are "suckin' on a chili dog"m.youtube.com SUBSCRIBE, smack that bell: https://bit.ly/2PELvW4 SUPPORT me on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3fsla8a FOLLOW ME ON SPOTIFY: https://spoti.fi/3lWgqZX MERCH: www.tommcgovern.com/merch FOLLOW ME ON IG/Twitter/TikTok @tommcgovern27 Hey, Patrons. You're the shit. Thank you so much: Janika Achenbach Bush Michael Palmer Weston Chambers Samie Postma ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A little ditty 'bout Jack & Diane Two American kids growing up in the heart land Jack, he's gonna be a football star Diane's debutante, back seat of Jacky's car Suckin' on chilli dog, suckin’ on a chili dog Suckin’ on a chili dog, suckin’ on a chi-li dog Suckin’ on a chili dog, suckin’ on a chili dog Suckin’ on a chili dog, suckin’ on a chili dog, chili dog Suckin’ on, a chili dog Suckin’ on a dog, suckin’ on a chili dog, chili, Suckin’ on, a chili dog Suckin’ on a dog, suckin’ on a chili dog, suckin’ on Suckin’ on, chili dogs Suckin’ on a dog, suckin’ on a chili dog Suckin’ on chili, suckin on a dog Suckin’ on a chili dog, suckin’ on chili dogs A little ditty 'bout Jack & Diane Two American kids suckin’ on a chili dog

Ok, this whole thread has been eye-opening on what the actual lyrics are for some songs.

I dunno, Jack and Diane is all about how horny teenagers don’t realize that they are going to grow up and become miserable one day. One of those songs where the bouncy melody masks how cynical it is

I always read the cynicism in that song as a sort of fake depthiness. Maybe because I can picture a boomer nodding along to it in a car, thinking "deep man, deep".

That’s because it’s bullshit Boomer nostalgia.

Yeah, maybe, I don’t really wish to defend Mellencamp as some super insightful lyricist. I don’t think the song is all that good, but it’s not “Summer of ‘69”, which is the more straightforward, completely earnest version of this sort of thing

yeah, that's fair

You guys shouldn't listen to anything done in the 20th century. It's time to put it into the grave and focus on this century.