“What else do I have to say?” Billy Joel rhetorically asked in one of his biggest hits, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which in its four minutes and six seconds managed to chronologically cram in references to 118 significant political, cultural, scientific, and sporting events that took place between 1949 (the year of the singer-songwriter’s birth) and 1989 (the year of the No. 1 single’s release). The edutainment classic climaxed with a quickly dated reference to the Coke-vs.-Pepsi “cola wars,” so obviously, there’s been plenty more to say since then.
And Fall Out Boy figured they should be the ones to say it — in a new version that picks up where Joel left off.
“I thought about [Joel’s] song a lot when I was younger,” Fall Out Boy bassist Peter Wentz explained in a statement Wednesday. “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.”
Fall Out Boy’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” remakes Joel’s Boomer-centric song with millennial/Gen Z-targeted lyrics about notable pop-culture events that took place between 1989 and 2023. Just as Joel’s original dramatically mentioned arguably the defining tragic news story of his generation, the assassination of JFK, FOB’s sequel of sorts ends with “World Trade, second plane” — a reference to their generation’s biggest front-page-news tragedy, 9/11.
FOB’s version covers other heavy news (the Rodney King L.A. riots, the Oklahoma City and Boston Marathon bombings, Columbine, Sandy Hook, George Floyd, Brexit, Trump), as well as various music scandals (Woodstock ’99, Kanye-vs.-Taylor, Fyre Fest) and random tabloid headliner-makers (John Bobbit, Balloon Boy, Meghan Markle, Tiger King). There are even a couple of nods to FOB’s pop/punk peers: My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade and Blink-182 singer “Tom DeLonge and aliens.”
Clocking in at a full 34 seconds shorter than Joel’s recording, Fall Out Boy’s remake (which — side note — should have been brilliantly titled “We Didn’t Start the Fyre”) certainly doesn’t encompass everything that has transpired in the past 34 years. For instance, while it references the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, and Prince, the late David Bowie is oddly overlooked. And there’s bafflingly zero mention of Bill or Hillary Clinton or of this century’s other most defining tragedy, the COVID-19 pandemic. But the band still covers a lot of ground — which is impressive, considering how much the news cycle has accelerated in the internet age, going “on and on and on and on” indeed. It’ll be fascinating to see which future world events are listed in the inevitable next remake, three decades from now.
Compare and contrast to Billy Joel’s version, and read all of Fall Out Boy’s new “We Didn’t Start the Fire” lyrics, below.
“We Didn’t Start the Fire 2023”
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
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it but we’re trying to fight it
More war in Afghanistan
Cubs go all the way again
Obama
Spielberg
Explosion Lebanon
Unabomber
Bobbit, John
Bombing Boston Marathon
Balloon Boy
War on Terror
Qanon
Trump gets impeached twice
Polar bears got no ice
Fyre Fest
Black Parade
Michael Phelps
Y2K
Boris Johnson
Brexit
Kanye West
Taylor Swift
Stranger Things
Tiger King
Ever Given Suez
Sandy Hook
Columbine
Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice
ISIS
LeBron James
Shinzo Abe blown away
Meghan Markle
George Floyd
Burj Khalifa
Metroid
Fermi paradox
Venus and Serena
Michael Jordan 23
YouTube killed MTV
Spongebob
Golden State Killer caught
Michael Jordan 45
Woodstock ‘99
Keaton Batman
Bush v. Gore
I can’t take it anymore
Elon Musk
Kaepernick
Texas failed electric grid
Jeff Bezos
Climate change
White rhino goes extinct
Great pacific garbage patch
Tom DeLonge and aliens
Mars Rover
Avatar
Self-driving electric cars
S-S-S-R-Is
Prince and the Queen die
World Trade
Second plane
What else do I have to say?
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on, and on, and on
And on, and on, and on, and on, and on
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