People have strong opinions on Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” History teachers trying desperately to engage bored students love the song, which rapidly chronicles dozens of major news events from 1949—the year of Joel’s birth—through 1989, the year the single was released. Other people find the tune mega-annoying and perhaps even overly forgiving of Baby Boomers, whom Joel essentially deems blameless in a world that’s always been wicked. (Joel himself thinks the song is musically pretty awful.)
Today, the debate takes on a new dimension as Fall Out Boy offer up their version, which covers stuff that’s happened in the 34 years since Joel’s original.
“I thought about this song a lot when I was younger,” FOB bassist Pete Wentz wrote in a statement. “All these important people and events- some that disappeared into the sands of time- others that changed the world forever. So much has happened in the span of the last 34 years- we felt like a little system update might be fun. Hope you like our take on it…”
One thing to note about Joel’s version is that it goes chronologically, taking us from Harry Truman—the guy who dropped the A-bomb—to “rock ‘n’ roller cola wars,” i.e. the battles for celebrity sponsorship waged between Coke and Pepsi. There’s a kind of commentary inherent in this progression toward triviality, and that’s lacking in FOB’s remake. Instead, the enduring Chicago pop-punks jumble up everything without any regard for time—which might actually be its own kind of commentary. In the internet age, everything seems to be happening at the same time.
For example, frontman Patrick Stump opens the song—which is musically pretty similar to Joel’s, albeit punkier—with things that date back roughly to 1990, 2010, 1992, and 2020. (It’s unclear which earthquakes and Icelandic volcanic eruptions he’s talking about.)
Captain Planet, Arab Spring
LA Riots Rodney King
Deep fakes, earthquakes
Iceland volcano
Just like Joel, FOB juxtapose super-serious events with sensationalist news items that momentarily captured people’s imaginations. Like in the second verse, where terrorists and conspiracy theorists show up alongside an allegedly abused wife’s infamous act of retaliation and a wild hoax about a kid supposedly carried away by a balloon.
Unabomber, Bobbit, John
Bombing Boston marathon
Balloon Boy, War on Terror
QAnon
One of the most memorable lines in Joel’s version is “Trouble in the Suez,” which ends the second verse with a reference to a 1956 crisis involving Egypt and the Suez Canal. (A lot of people think Billy says, “Trouble in the sewers,” but he doesn’t.) Fall Out Boy also name-check the Egyptian waterway in a line about the Ever Given, that container ship that got wedged in the canal back in 2021.
Boris Johnson, Brexit
Kanye West and Taylor Swift
Stranger Things, Tiger King
Ever Given Suez
Another famous line in Joel’s song is “JFK blown away/What else do I have to say?” FOB work a political assassination—the 2022 murder of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe—into the opening section of the third verse, which also touches on two of the biggest problems facing America in the 21st century: mass shootings and violence against people of color perpetrated by the police.
Sandy Hook, Columbine
Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice
ISIS, Lebron James
Shinzo Abe blown away
In the final verse, Stump and co. finally get around to mentioning 9/11, perhaps the single defining moment of the period covered by the song. (Weirdly, the pandemic doesn’t get a shout.) Also: antidepressants, the passing of His Royal Badness, and the space experiments that might allow us to one day leave this cursed planet.
Mars rover, Avatar
Self-driving electric cars
S-S-R-Is
Prince and the Queen die
World Trade, second plane
What else do I have to say?
You can read all the lyrics to Fall Out Boy’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on Genius now.
