Wikipedia pageviews this year for each line of ‘We Didn't Start the Fire’ | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia pageviews this year for each line of ‘We Didn't Start the Fire’

tomlum.com

142 pointsunderyx45 comments

I feel so surprised, didn't realize this song had such lyrics. Makes me really want to come up with a modern set of lyrics and go to a karaoke. Something like this:

~~~

Mitch McConnel, AOC, trade war, Cardi B,

fake news, ICO, arnold schwarzenegger,

wiki leaks, bitcoin, hacker news, facebook,

North Korea, South Sudan, annexing Crimea,

Game of Thrones, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Key and Peel,

Buttigieg, Snoop Dog, can you "feel the Bern"?

We didn't start the fire, sha-lalA-la-lAla

(and so on... please someone finish the rest)

https://twitter.com/we_didnt_start was a pretty hard-working bot for this sort of thing.

I’m bummed it didn’t match the rhythms, which isn’t impossible for a bot, see https://twitter.com/wiki_tmnt/status/1142070265150464000?s=2... . Maybe I should make a follow up bot.

you _should_ make one!!

Do that!

Sadly too many `vs` breaks the flow and rhythm

Closest actual current song is probably “Love It If We Made It”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1Wl1B7DPegc

Big fan of this one from 2012

https://youtu.be/DYK9-Cl5lRU

The College Humor version is a great throwback to the 2009 internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QyYaPWasos

On a related topic, apparently the lyrics for "We didn't start the fire" and "It's the end of the world as we know it" by R.E.M work quite well when played together, despite being thematically contradictory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEYc8ar2Bpw

My favourite connection ever was when I noticed as a kid that the Soviet Union anthem and Gummi Bears' theme song[0] can have lyrics swapped and still match perfectly. Try it!

[0] - the Disney one; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HCjQbKowUo, or your local language version.

Fantastic. I always connected those songs in my head, I guess because they're both rapid-fire lists of vaguely-connected concepts. Glad someone agrees.

If you're in to that sort of thing sing Amazing Grace to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme song (or vice versa).

This is remarkably good.

My favourite mashup of his is Village People's Y.M.C.A with Hans Zimmer's Inception soundtrack. It really puts the lyrics in the spotlight

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DsoCe7C4Kmk

Not as good as Smack my Bitch up the Orinoco Flow! I'll admit, the lyrics don't quite work together in that one.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dLScpNjQbak

We're Gonna Build a Framework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm2h0cbvsw8

Gave me PTSD from when I had to make a choice on a backend framework.

Thank you

That was terrible, and yet I finished the whole song.

"England's got a new Queen" seems to have 1.5m views - how is that a more popular search term than "richard nixon" or "marilyn monroe"?

I can only assume it's some kind of google suggested term after people type england, and then they click on it thinking it's breaking news ...

But it seems a weird outlier

If you click on a term, you’ll see the page it leads to. I’m assuming they manually assigned a page per line and then counted pageviews for each page.

oh i thought it was actual search term

It's the page for Elizabeth II

I wonder if when the song was written, the phrase was actually a reference to princess diana.

It's an oblique reference to the royal culture of the time, which was indeed pretty cult-like, but also - I believe he is referring to Elizabeth II's coronation as it was a fairly significant socio-political event in the Western world when it happened - the crux of the British Empire, one might say, and by referencing it, Joel made a pretty wry statement about the world powers ..

Woah, I had never heard of the Syringe Tide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringe_tide)... which was caused by the Fresh Kills landfill??? You can't make this stuff up.

> The landfill was opened in 1948 as a temporary landfill but by 1955 it became the largest landfill in the world

Indeed.

Ha! I did the same in 2014, interesting to see how it has changed in that time http://interconnected.org/home/2014/12/12/billy_joel

Genius link here, in case anyone needs it: https://genius.com/1136925

Wikipedia's own article on the song has a brief summary of each event, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn%27t_Start_the_Fire

Can't scroll down the page without hearing the song in my head.

"Here Comes Another Bubble" uses the same tune:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

This song came out in 2007.

I just went through and clicked on the dozen or so I didn’t recognize, and I’m much better off for doing it. This is a fun and great site.

I think log scale or some different minimum/increment (start from the min instead of zero) would make the chart more informative.

'England's got a new Queen' really skews the precieved scale as most everything else is sub 500k, with it pulling ~1500k

somewhat related (sorry for going off on a tangent) ....

the lyrics from the Datarock's song "True Stories" are entirely made up of Talking Heads song names.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRXGFcsrMg

Also the lyrics of the song "Seed (2.0)" from The Roots have hidden meaning[1] that kind of blew my mind (huge Roots fan here):

"I interpret the song to mean that they are attempting to unite the rock and roll and hip hop genres. In this case, they are trying to plant the seed of hip hop within the womb of rock and roll. He's having to do "fertilize another against my lover's will" because hip hop is resistant to integrating other musical styles. This interpretation is supported by the lines in the first verse that go:

"She don't want no rock-n-roll She want platinum or ice or gold She want a whole lotta somethin' to fold"

The lines are describing the hip hop culture obsession with money and "bling." Whereas, "I lick the opposition because she don't take no birth control" signifies that rock and roll is open and willing to integrate influences from other genres.

If you're still doubtful, just listen to the beats underlying the song. You have the heavy beats that are commonplace in hip hop and then the distinct guitar riff."

https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858522508/

The crazy thing is that Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey) takes that idea one step further within his own lyrics by fusing every (hip-hop) song of his album "The New Danger" with a different genre showing that Hip Hop does lend itself for fusion. E.g. his song "The Rape Over" actually sounds like a song from "The Doors". The whole "The New Danger" album is full of examples like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srx-Wf5KrzQ

A simple yet brilliant song

For being based on a gimmick, I agree. The thing is you can only have one of these. Anything even vaguely similar will just a a knockoff. For a less memorable gimmick song, anyone remember Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex?

What impresses me is Billy Joel's range as a musician and song writer. Piano Man, Movin' Out, We Didn't Start the Fire, and Longest Time are all popular, but so different.

I ran across another gimmick song this year: Netflix Trip by AJR. The narrator basically relives his childhood over a Netflix binge of The Office.

A brilliant song? Not really, its pretty musically trite all things considered.

A brilliant bit of hubristic agit-prop? For sure. Fully entrenches the cultural righteousness that enslaves us all at the moment.

The danger is in believing the perspective it espouses.

Fascinating. Although the tiny numbers for 'vaccine' and 'birth control' make me query what's going on here

Those seem to be pretty specific pages on wikipedia, likely to refer specifically to what the song was.

Vaccine links to the polio vaccine and birth control to the (nearly empty) wikipedia page for 'oral contraceptive pill'

The pill link is just a portal to other links. When I used DDG to search for "the pill" it took me to one of the child links first, which has rich details on one form of the pill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pi...

Vaccine is foreign word to one afraid vaccines.

Pro choice, pro life ... what the heck is birth control?

Is Elizabeth the 2nd the most popular person in that list of people or is beth a common name?

[edit: I mean to say, there are hot topics, and search results that land on wikipedia, and the two don't line up super well for some specific parts of this particular report]

> Is Elizabeth the 2nd the most popular person in that list of people or is beth a common name?

If I Google "Elizabeth", there is no link to the Wikipedia page for Elizabeth II on the first page in Google (I do realize of course that Google results can differ wildly by person), but Elizabeth I, and links to various news items about Elizabeth II. Of course people might click Elizabeth I and end up clicking through to her. I have a hard time thinking that drives a huge amount of traffic, though. If I Google "Beth", neither queen is on the first page.

But I'd think the huge amount of the news coverage about her related to a long range of other events and people, is likely what drives a large part of what drives the Wikipedia lookups. E.g. she's probably been in the news even more than usual over the last year over things like the Trump visits and the Meghan Markle wedding, but there's also a steady stream of coverage of her due to various other visits to/by high profile people.

When you're on Google searching for the Queen, you just type "the Queen". There's been no other queen (apart from the Bohemian Rhapsody guys) in a major English-speaking country for the better part of a century, so there's no need to refer to her by her name.

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