For a whole term of secondary school history lessons, I spent an hour each week listening to Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’
In hindsight, it’s quite a good way to structure an afternoon. Using an ’80s earworm to run through the most important historical events in post-war USA is a novel way of ensuring we remembered the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series in 1955.
And though the song itself was hardly a critical darling at the time (Billy Joel himself compared its melody to “a dentist’s drill”) since then it’s become a firm stalwart of popular culture. The broadly chronological pile-up of famous faces and geo-political crises actually captures the desperate feeling of information overload rather well. In the years since, that feeling has only grown more pronounced.
Captain Planet, Arab Spring
L.A. riots, Rodney King
As a result, every few years from the turn of the century someone has decided the time is ripe for another stab at the apple. With everyone from The Simpsons to the guy that made those Annoying Orange videos getting involved, the only thing all of these non-sensical strings of world events have in common is that the songs themselves are universally terrible.
Yesterday, 28 June 2023, Fall Out Boy declared it was their turn. Joel’s original, which detailed the significant people and events of the previous 40 years, was released on September 18, 1989, a date that was randomly 33 years, 9 months and 10 days before yesterday. Even Jimmy Fallon’s celeb-filled MCU recap in 2019 arguably had more reason to exist than this one.
The song, for the avoidance of doubt, is terrible. If I thought Fall Out Boy were capable of it, I’d have thought the mess they’d put out was a witty comment on the need to blindly repackage ’80s nostalgia in place of culture. Unfortunately, I don’t, so I don’t. But that doesn’t mean the message isn’t there.
Harry Potter, Twilight
Michael Jackson dies
Nuclear accident, Fukushima, Japan
Crimean peninsula
There’s a reason ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ parodies have become increasingly ubiquitous since the dawn of the internet. On the surface, making what amounts to an incomplete list of recent historical events in a roughly melodic order is both incredibly easy and outdated the second you look at the next day’s news, especially in the rapidly changing world we currently inhabit.
Fall Out Boy’s version, though, seems uniquely half-arsed. Aside from attempting to rhyme “Kim Jong Un” with “Iron Man,” they haven’t even bothered to put the thing in chronological order. And despite nominally detailing the events from 1989 to the present day, the third verse mentions “Metroid,” a video game series which released its first instalment in 1986 (in their defence, they did need a rhyme for “George Floyd”; as a counterargument to that, though, what the f**k?).
Michael Jordan 45
Woodstock ‘99
Keaton Batman, Bush v Gore
I can’t take it anymore
This mess, though, which among other things conflates Tiger King with the bombing of the Boston marathon, perfectly illustrates the way we absorb information online. There’s seemingly no reason behind the selection of events Stump and co. have decided to lump together, just as there’s only occasionally a serviceable rhyme.
Instead, the new ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ is a flaming barrage of names and dates with minimal artistic merit, the logical end-point to the fusion of news and entertainment.
It is, in other words, the perfect song for 2023. It might, purely by accident, be a work of genius.
