The first thing I noticed about this music video was that everything is in reverse. People are used to experiencing time from beginning to end, so it was hard to piece together what was happening. It wasn’t until I found a version that played it in order that I realized what was going on. Based on my understanding, the husband is having an affair with another woman. This woman gets jealous, locks the wife in the closet and waits for the husband gets home so that she can kill him. I don’t think she was intending to kill the wife though. If she wanted to kill her she had the perfect opportunity to. In the end she gets hit with a breezeblock and falls into the bathtub, where she is held down by “soggy clothes and breezeblocks”. She’s also dead which probably prevents her from leaving.
I agree that the Husband in this video turned out to be the good guy and that it’s meant to make us question the perspective, but I don’t think that men always seem like the bad guy. I don’t think proving that men aren’t always bad was the point of this music video, especially since it was the woman who was the first one to attack.
Seem to be from the woman’s perspective. She’s going to to take his honey (his wife). This probably means that if he chooses his wife over her, she’ll kill his wife.
The lyrics, “Please don’t go, I’ll eat you whole, I love you so” is from the book “Where the Wild Things are”. The lines in the book are
But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go we’ll
eat you up-we love you so!”
And Max said, “No!”
The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye.
I think this children’s book was a prominent source of inspiration for this song. In the book, the main character, Max, sees the creatures and called them “wild things” and when they see him they think he is the “wild thing”. So, in the music video, the woman sees the husband and his wife and think that they are “wild” and the couple think the woman is “wild”. I think that the woman is the one who is most like the wild things. When the husband denies her love she goes insane and tries to kills him. In the video she is shown throwing glass bottled and practically clawing the guy.
Many of the lyrics also allude to medical terms.
“Citrezene your fever’s gripped me again”
“She bruises coughs she splutters pistol shots
But hold her down with soggy clothes and breezeblocks
She’s morphine queen of my vaccine my love my love love love, la la la la”
Cetirizine is a type of allergy medicine. This medicine is also something that can be overdosed.
This song has many implications of death and I think referring to cetirizine is a reference to suicide. At the end, after he’s killed the woman, he stays in the bathroom instead of going to his wife. The bathroom is usually a place where people keep pharmaceutical drugs, so by showing him staying in the bathroom could imply that he’s considering suicide.
The line about morphine really caught my attention. Since morphine is an opiate, it manipulates the brain to receive less pain signals. It can also increase the release of dopamine and endorphins which can make a person feel euphoric. Morphine is also a drug that can be overdosed. When the lines says that she is the “queen of my vaccine”, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what that means. I interpret it to mean that the woman dominates his wife. His wife is the antidote to him and the woman is like a drug he keeps overdosing on.
I thought this comment was really interesting. It could be true that the woman was a lover that the husband abandoned for the wife, but it doesn’t change the implication that there was an affair and that the woman went insane.
Although Billy Joel’s hit song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” wasn’t intended to become a deeply political song, people found it to be extremely telling and honest. In an interview, Billy Joel states that he tries to stay out of politics. In another interview he talks about how he thought the song wasn’t very good because the melody was terrible. He said that he just started writing down major events in chronological order. In general I think it’s a good idea for musicians to avoid being involved with politics as much as they can. If a musician wants to get involved, more power to them, but it’s certainly easier to avoid becoming involved. Even at Eastman, I find that there are a lot of political events happening behind the scenes that have potential to affect students negatively. There are politics with part assignments, paychecks, international students, relations with other schools, funding, scholarships, etc. Heck, there could be a (biased because I wrote it) song just about the living situations in the dorms:
Leaking roof, moldy showers,
rats, expired orange juice,
res life, piss bottles,
throw up in the halls.
Smelly washers, used condoms,
mental illness, fire alarms
Burned a candle, on probation,
The Elevator’s broken
We don’t want to live here
We have to buy it and we can not fight it
We don’t want to live here
We have to buy it and we can not fight it
The list could go on forever. Once students become involved with politics they usually end up having to sacrifice time and energy they could be using for becoming better people and musicians. So, most of the time when musicians are sucked into politics they don’t have as much energy to focus on a musical career. A lot composers and artists use politics as inspiration though. For example Shostakovich wrote a lot of music as a satire on Russian leaders. Eminem does the same thing in his song, “Role Model”. Eminem and Shostakovich refer to events in their music, but the difference is that Billy Joel’s song is unbiased. What makes that so cool is that people can interpret the song however they want. Billy Joel isn’t very public about controversial topics and he doesn’t apply negative or positive connotations in the lyrics. So, people could take the lyrics, “Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again/Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock” and say that he is against birth control and Nixon. Or they could say he thinks birth control and the moon landing is great but Nixon and Punk Rock is now. There are many ways to interpret this song depending on the listener’s personal view.In my unprofessional opinion I think that he is liberal simply because is seems like rock stars tend to be more open minded towards topics like gay marriage, abortion/birth control, immigration, etc.
In the song, Billy Joel mentions not only negative events but positive events. He sings about vaccines, Prokofiev, James Dean, Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, and many other famous people. What’s interesting is that all of these people were icons and held a lot of power in politics due to the fact that they had a large audience. Some people, like Prokofiev were directly involved with politics. Even though it’s probably easier for musicians to stay out of politics, it seems impossible for famous artists to stay out of the spotlight when they have such large influence. By writing this song, it seems like Billy joel is signalling his interest in politics. Why would someone write this kind of song if they didn’t have something to say about the topics? It seems like people in general tend to signify what their views are and their thoughts either through talking or by reacting to something. I think this is especially true with musicians. Whenever we play something we find a way to relate to it so that we can express something we think or feel. This is just what Billy Joel is doing. He’s writing something he can relate to and knows about which resulted in something a lot of people related to.
Role Model:
This song is timeless because it makes people think. While it’s mostly un relatable to people who didn’t live through the era, it’s a simple form that can be applied to any era. I even found a couple “We didn’t Start the Fire 2017” editions online:
Plastic garbage washed ashore, U.S. flirts with martial law
Schwarzenegger ratings wars, I can’t take it anymore!
We didn’t start the fire
Now the planet’s burning
And we’re anti-learning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
So, I think what makes this piece have so much impact is the honesty and it’s power to make people think about what is happening around them. In the “Music Trumps Politics” article we read about, it says that “Lamell’s invitation was explicitly intended to create a new group of people for desiring, and taking pleasure in, classical music–a pleasure, according to Lamell, that is apolitical”. Like the author of the article, I disagree. I think it is virtually impossible for music to be apolitical. The artist can write or perform a song intended to be removed from politics, but they can’t stop their audiences from making their own interpretations on their music just like “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. It wasn’t intended to be super political, but there are copious amounts of articles and websites dedicated to decoding the events and politics in the song.
Betsy Devos Brochure (?)
Handlebars by Flobots:
Handlebars is another example of popular music addressing politics!
Later, the first circus showed up in Paris in 1782. It was directed by Philip Astley and composing and financing was done by Charles Dibdin. The written pieces were either intermezzos or comedies and were performed by singing and dancing children. These pieces were officially called “marches” and sometimes called “screamers”. I think the reason for this was because a march was used for grand entrances and usually people cheer and clap when a performer enters the stage. The other style of music was a “Galop”. This style was for accompanying dangerous acts and was sometimes performed on xylophone (Wikipedia). I found this really interesting because in a lot of cartoons, a xylophone is used in suspenseful and exciting scenes.
Here is an example of a “tip toe” xylophone effect:
In the early 1900’s, brass bands started to gain popularity in circus music. The idea was that, people would be more likely to come to the circus if they could hear the music from miles away. In fact, many circuses had a steam powered piano that could be heard from far away called a “calliope”! (Wikipedia)
One example of Circus Music is in “The Little Rascals” at 2:17
Many modern concerts contain a large array of music. It’s not uncommon to see Maurice Ravel, John Williams, and Robert Russell Bennett scheduled in the same concert. In fact, the ever so popular Cirque Du Soleil uses a wide variety of music. Mixing Rock, Jazz, French influences, and Opera into one show isn’t anything special for them. Not only that, but according to Kim Baston of La Trobe University, Australia who wrote an extensive paper on Circus music and performance, “Circus is a global entertainment form, as it is not reliant on the spoken word, and has easily incorporated performers of different nationalities”. Watching Cirque Du Soleil shows online demonstrates just that. The performers represent a wide range of ethnicities and the language they sing in the show is one that is made up. When the clowns get up on stage, a lot of their vocalization is gibberish with a few spoken words of an actual language here and there as shown in the video below:
The use of popular music in circus bands also helped popularize brass bands in America. Although music attracted larger audiences, the music was inferior to the physical performances. Even in contemporary circuses, music is always seen as the accompaniment unless it is performed in a purely auditory setting like a concert. Overall the combination of circus acts and music can be seen as similar to opera or musicals. It sprouts from the same concept, but grew into something uniquely it’s own.
