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 "U2" mentioned in the song isn't referring to the Ireland-based band U2, it is referring to the American reconnaissance plane that the Soviet Union shot down in 1960, capturing his pilot Francis Gary Powers. The band took the name because this incident.
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.