Growing up, I was a big fan of late-night talk shows. As a kid I watched Johnny Carson whenever I was allowed to stay up that late. I didn’t always get the jokes in the monologue, but sometimes I did. I loved the silly skits, especially Carnac the Magnificent. And I usually enjoyed the various celebrity guests.
But while Carson had been cool, he was also old when I started watching, and for a young teenager, old meant decidedly not cool. At some point Carson was old enough he couldn’t do it every night, and Jay Leno became the permanent guest host, taking the reins on Monday nights. I loved Leno. I made sure I always watched when he was hosting.
In eighth grade I took a drama class at school, and one of our assignments was to read up on the celebrity of our choice and then pretend to do an interview with them. I chose Jay Leno to interview. I thought that would make me cool.
It amuses me to no end to think that back then I thought Jay Leno – who I would now consider to be the blandest and most vanilla celebrities – was the coolest guy around.
At some point I discovered David Letterman. I don’t think I ever thought he was cool – he was more nerdy and weird, like me. He was hilarious. With his Stupid Pet Tricks and doing things like wearing a Velcro suit and jumping onto a wall, he was like nobody I’d ever seen before. I learned a lot about my own sense of humor from David Letterman.
And then there was Arsenio Hall. Now he was cool. His guests were cool, his musical acts were cool. His audience was cool doing the whole “whoof whoof” thing instead of clapping and The Dogpound.
He wasn’t just cool; he was hip. He was tuned into a part of the culture that guys like Carson or Leno and even Letterman just didn’t understand. I loved it.
One night, during his monologue, Arsenio started chanting, “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,” the crowd ecstatically joined in. He continued, “We don’t need no water no…” and as the crowd started to say the next line, Arsenio smiled, waved his hands back and forth emphatically, and told them to stop. He couldn’t sing the next line, or he’d get in trouble. The audience went crazy.
I think he did the same thing the next night and maybe a few times more over the next couple of weeks. I was intrigued. I had no idea what song they were singing. But I liked it. I was especially curious about what that next line was. What could be so bad that they couldn’t say it on Arsenio?
Sometime later I discovered it was “…let the motherfucker burn.”
I don’t remember ever listening to the song. It certainly didn’t become a staple. It is possible my brother simply told me what the line was, and I never actually heard it. But that moment on Arsenio stuck in my mind. I loved the way the audience shouted it with glee.
To this day I’ll periodically say, “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” just to see if anyone responds. I did that the other day while I was on a walk with my family. They had no idea what I was talking about. This made me want to listen to the song.
Pulling it up on Spotify made me realize how little of the song I actually know. The famous part doesn’t come in until the very end, and everything before that is rather repetitive and annoying.
I get why it became a hit and why Arsenio was singing it that day. It would be a fun song to have playing in a club or at a party, or indeed singing on late night TV. It has a good beat, and it has these sing-along lyrics where it asks the audience to repeat back and forth, and then there is the roof. That’s a crazy fun thing to shout. That’s cool on a dance floor but rather tedious listening in your car. I swear I almost turned it off before it even got to the part about the roof and it being on fire.
Still, those memories are good ones, and you can bet I’ll still be repeating those lines even as an old man.
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