As of 2023, Brigitte Bardot, Bob Dylan, Chubby Checker and Bernhard Goetz are the only real-life people mentioned by name in the song, still living. Harry S. Truman, Walter Winchell, Joseph McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Sugar Ray Robinson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Rocky Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, Joseph Stalin, Georgi Malenkov, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sergei Prokofiev, Winthrop Rockefeller, Roy M. Cohn, Juan Domingo Perón, Arturo Toscanini, Albert Einstein, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Nikita Khrushchev, Grace Kelly, Boris Pasternak, Jack Kerouac, Enlai Zhou, Charles de Gaulle, Buddy Holly, Syngman Rhee, John F. Kennedy, Ernest Hemingway, Adolf Eichmann, Sonny Liston, Pope Paul VI, Malcolm X, Ho Chí Minh and Ayatollah Khomeini were all already deceased at the time the song was released in 1989. Doris Day, Johnnie Ray, Joe DiMaggio, Richard Nixon, Marlon Brando, Queen Elizabeth II, Roy Campanella, Mickey Mantle, Fidel Castro, John Glenn, Floyd Patterson, Menachem Begin, Ronald Reagan and Sally Ride have all passed away since it was released.
The song was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year.
The song's lyrics include brief, rapid-fire allusions to 119 people and events between 1949, the year of Billy Joel's birth, and 1989, when the song was released on his album Storm Front.
Billy Joel got the idea for the song when he had just turned 40.
The "U-2" mentioned in the song, isn't referring to the Ireland-based band, it is referring to the American reconnaissance plane that was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960.