Brigitte Bardot’s death trims Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ list to 3 living names

On the list: Brigitte Bardot had been the last surviving woman listed in the hit "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel. (Franco Origlia/Getty Images/Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

We didn’t start the list. But music fans continue to track the 59 people named in Billy Joel’s 1989 pop hit, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The death of French actress Brigitte Bardot on Sunday trimmed the list to just three who are still alive.

It’s true. An update on Reddit, which included a chart listing every person named, notes that only Chubby Checker, Bob Dylan and Bernhard Goetz are still alive from the Piano Man’s hit.

The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts in December 1989, remaining at No. 1 for two weeks.

Checker and Dylan are both 84 and are well known to music fans. Goetz, who is 87, was charged in the shooting of four Black teens on a subway in New York City in 1984 after they allegedly tried to rob him.

“Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo” is the reference to the singer who made “The Twist” a national craze during the early 1960s.

“Hemingway, Eichmann, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’/Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion” is the lyric for the iconic singer-songwriter.

And for Goetz, the line went “Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz.”

Bardot was the last living woman mentioned in the song.

A music fan, u/cavedave, shared the chart on Reddit’s r/dataisbeautiful subreddit and it was updated when Bardot died on Dec. 28 at the age of 91.

Why is this list relevant? It probably is not but it gave listeners a microcosm of history from 1949, when Joel was born, until the late 1980s.

Go ahead, sing it: “Rock and roller, cola wars, I can’t take it anymore.”

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