That's a question without an actual answer, so perhaps I should rephrase it. What popular song offends me most as a listener and (former?) songwriter?
That's a question with an actual answer, and that answer is Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire". There are multiple layers to its awfulness, each of which injects exponent math into the world of music, turning what might have been a stupid novelty song into a lasting memory of a time that had nothing memorable about it. Before going any further, I feel like I need to say this; No matter what I say from here on out, I love Billy Joel's run of 80s singles, and I even do have a lot of affection for "We Didn't Start The Fire".
That doesn't mean it's not terrible.
Novelty songs hold a particular brand of appeal. They remind us of a specific moment in time, which is only explained by the context of when they were produced. For example, the fact that Cherry Poppin' Daddies and Brian Setzer had hits at the same time with old-fashioned swing music is utterly incomprehensible now, and only makes sense if you were there for that very brief window of time in which that nostalgia hit. Pastiches are made all the time, but few of them break through being exactly that and become remembered songs of their own.
Billy Joel was a hearty proprietor of those sorts of songs. He had released "For The Longest Time", which was a throwback to old Motown and vocal groups. He had also released "Uptown Girl", which was his love letter to 60s pop. Billy was not an 'Artist' spelled with a capital letter. He was an artist who knew he was making a commercial product for a commercial audience. He made music because it was his job, feeding us empty calories, and then retiring when there wasn't a need on either end to continue the relationship.
His penchant for novelty hit its apex with "We Didn't Start The Fire". Billy Joel looked at the world of pop music and decided what we needed most was a history lesson, but not one that actually told us anything of importance. No, his lesson would merely be to name-check as many things as he could that happened during his lifetime. So in making a song that was supposed to be about the world, he actually made it about himself. That's... something.
Looking at the lyrics, we can see this is not a song in any normal parlance. Billy is not telling a story, nor is he trying to make any sort of cogent point. The verses come and go with lists of pop-culture nouns, not sounding that different than if you were playing "The $10,000 Pyramid" about celebrities and the news.
"Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Jo DiMaggio"
The first lines of the song tell you everything you need to know. Billy throws out references with zero context, saying absolutely nothing about who these people are, what they did that was notable, or why we should still give a shit about any of them. He was that old guy name-checking the past as if to tell us why things were better in his day, but he was younger when he wrote this song than I am now, so he wasn't even old enough to feel that curmudgeonly about the state of the world.
Unlike when Fall Out Boy tried to update the song, Billy at least has the decency to go in chronological order. We move from the fifties through the eighties, spending decades wondering when Billy is going to get to the point of any of this. The song is very much as if Barenaked Ladies "One Week" or Beck's "Loser" were actually about anything, rather than a bunch of random words thrown together because they fit the right cadence.
"We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning"
Now we get to the 'message' of the song. Billy is finally telling us the reason for playing this word-association game that sounds more like a dementia screening test than a pop song. The point is that the world has always felt like it was falling apart, always felt like it was on fire, always had problems we will never be able to solve.
That is absolutely true, and it's a point that can be worth making... except that Billy doesn't make that point.
Billy mentions Richard Nixon and Watergate, but doesn't tell us what the words mean. He leaves it for us to do the research for every reference he makes, which is a failure of his imagination. Songs should not require us to do homework, because a syllabus is not the same thing as learning. Billy has given us the outline of what he thinks is an important story about how the world hasn't changed, even as it constantly changes. The outline is nothing, though, without the meat-on-the-bone that fills in the story.
If you read the cast listing on a movie's IMDB page, you haven't seen the movie. If you've only heard Billy list a bunch of historical names, you haven't learned anything about who or why he mentioned them.
"We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it"
No, Billy, you didn't. Fighting against the inertia of cultural rot would involve telling us what's actually going on, what was so wrong with it, and maybe giving us an indication of how things could have been fixed. To bitch without providing any answers is bad enough, but he doesn't even bitch about the problems that are annoying him. Billy assumes you can figure it out just by his stuttering out a few names. Complete sentences were too much for him at this point.
Billy Joel was rarely a good lyricist, and he only got worse as he could sense his own impending disinterest with writing songs. The nadir of that apathy is "We Didn't Start The Fire", a song so lazy few people can remember the words, let alone the point.
The worst thing that can happen to a novelty song is to become a hit, because when that happens, it serves as an aural wormhole from one shitty moment to another, echoing its stench throughout time. I would ask what we were thinking making this song a hit, but that would be even more thought, and I've already put more of it into this song than Billy ever did.
Billy and his generation might not have started the fire, but they didn't let it consume the master tapes of this song. That blame falls squarely on him, and perhaps that shouldn't be so easily forgiven.
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