The Billy Joel Death Tracker

Everyone[citation needed] loves Billy Joel's 1989 single "We Didn't Start The Fire", the second-greatest Billboard #1 pop hit of the 1980s whose first lyric references proto-rocker Johnnie Ray. But I know what you're thinking: how many of the people mentioned in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" are still alive? Great question. By my count, of the 55 people name-dropped in "We Didn't Start the Fire," exactly four of them are still alive as of 2022:

Methodology

Before we continue, I should note that this numbering system is slightly contentious. First of all, it only includes people mentioned directly by name in the song, which results in some slightly counterintuitive judgment calls. For instance, some of you might be asking, "shouldn't Queen Elizabeth II be on this list?" The answer to which is no, because in the line "Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen," Queen Elizabeth II is not name-dropped, even though Dwight Eisenhower (#13) is. As the subject of the sentence "England's got a new queen" is "England," and because the word "queen" is lowercase, I have chosen to interpret the lyric as a reference to QEII's coronation, and the phrase "new queen" as referring to an unspecified female monarch and not the woman herself.

However, somewhat controversially, I am counting Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as #53 on this list. I admit that the lyric "Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan" is orthographically ambiguous, and that the presence or absence of an apostrophe here completely changes the meaning of that lyric. Several websites (most notably Genius.com) list the line as "Ayatollahs in Iran" sans apostrophe; however, both the official Billy Joel website and the inner sleeve of Billy Joel's 1989 Storm Front album and the fictional Billy Joel newspaper on the front of the "We Didn't Start the Fire" CD list the line with an apostrophe, which to me seems pretty close to a confirmation that the line is a reference to the singular Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and not any and all prominent Shi'ites involved in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. (See the image on the right.)

Although, to be clear, even if the line were "Ayatollahs in Iran" sans apostrophe, that would not put, e.g. Ali Khamenei (1939-) on our list of living people namedropped in "We Didn't Start the Fire", because he is not listed by name. Likewise, no individual members of the Mafia c. 1959 nor the individual Russian soldiers in Afghanistan c. 1979 would be included in this list, because those individuals aren't named in the song.

The one exception to this rule is that I am counting the reference to "[the] Rosenbergs" as a simultaneous reference to both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (numbers #9 and #10, order irrelevant) because they are a package deal much like Liston (#46) and Patterson (#47).

Finally, some miscellanea: In the line "Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania," Lawrence of Arabia is obviously referring to the 1962 film and not the real life Col. Thomas Edward Lawrence, and "Beatlemania" is a distinct concept from "The Beatles" (hence, Paul and Ringo are not on this list); the Davy Crockett referenced in the song is a television serial and not the real life Davy Crockett (likewise with Peter Pan, who has the additional issue of being fictional); Richard Nixon (#7) is mentioned twice but only counted once for convenience's sake, as is John F. Kennedy (#40) - and to be clear, I am assuming the "Kennedy" in the line "Payola and Kennedy" is a reference to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, not Jacqueline nor Robert nor JFK Jr, and see no good reason to assume otherwise; that being said, it *is* ambiguous which Rockefeller is being referred to in the second verse, but the Internet seems convinced it's a reference to Winthrop Rockefeller and his 1954 divorce rather than John or Nelson; finally, note that we are listing people, and "space monkey(s)" are not people, and even if they were, it would be impossible to verify which of the dozens of primates sent into space the line is referring to.

The Full List

With that in mind, here is the complete list of people name-dropped in "We Didn't Start the Fire," organized from earliest to latest deaths. (N.b.: I have not yet organized this list by date of death beyond the year, so, e.g., Harry Truman may have died a few days after Walter Winchell.)

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