Fall Out Boy Falls Short
New version of "We Didn't Start The Fire" Fails where the original succeeded
On Tuesday, Fall Out Boy put out notice that they were releasing a cover of "We Didn't Start the Fire". This cover, however, would be "updated" to pick up where the original song left off in 1989 and bring us to the present day.
It dropped yesterday.
The musicianship of the song is very good. Fall Out Boy did a good recreation of the sound of the original song (that Billy Joel, ironically enough, hated) and did so in their own style. There is no issue with that.
The problem with the song is the way the lyrics are presented.
The original Joel version presents 118 different events of the song. They are almost exactly in chronological order by year. For example, the Joel version starts:
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, televisionNorth Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye"
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye
That first verse covers nothing but the years 1949 and 1952 with things that actually happened during those years.
Fall Out Boy's version, in comparison, is all over the place
Captain Planet, Arab Spring
L.A. riots, Rodney King
Deep fakes, earthquakes
Iceland volcano
Oklahoma City bomb
Kurt Cobain, Pokémon
Tiger Woods, MySpace
Monsanto, GMOs
Harry Potter, Twilight
Michael Jackson dies
Nuclear accident, Fukushima, Japan
Crimean peninsula
Cambridge Analytica
Kim Jong Un
Robert Downey Jr., Iron Man
It starts with 1990, jumps immediately to 2011, back to 1992, and all the way to the modern day with Deep Fakes within the first ten words of the song.
Somehow the Michael Keaton as Batman, which was in 1989, doesn't make it into the song at the 4th verse.
It is also what is notable for *not* making its way into the song. A list from the top of my head of omissions includes:
COVID
January 6th
Cancellation of the 1994 World Series
BLM
The OJ Trial
Reality Television
Streaming services
Google
Twitter
Facebook
TikTok
Gay Pride
Any popes
I'm sure you can think of many more.
One of the premises of the song when Joel wrote it was that it was a chronological listing of history from Joel's birth in 1949 until then-present-day 1989. The Fall Out Boy version is merely a mish-mash of things that have happened over the last 34 years that leaves you, the listener, trying to sort out what happened when.
Kudos to Fall Out Boy for attempting to do what many have called for previously. But despite excelling musically, Fall Out Boy's attempt falls short.