Timewise it seems to jump around more than the original, but I still liked it a lot.
Fall Out Boy - We Didn’t Start the Fire (Lyric Video) - YouTube
Thanks for sharing this. I love the idea and both Billy Joel and Fallout Boy are among my favorites. Considering what clever lyrics FOB are capable of, these are a little lame. I realize it’s essentially just listing factoids, but it doesn’t sound like they tried very hard to make it . . .flow? Like they just shoved words in without regard to rhyme or meter(?) Sorry, I don’t know the correct terms. Also, it doesn’t appear to be in chronological order. Not that it has to but I think it would add something.
My list “Top 10 Pop Songs I’d Eradicate from Human History” now goes to 11. (WDSTF now has the dubious distinction of being on the list twice.)
Fentanyl, Logan Paul
Andrew Tate, dead malls
Bader-Ginsburg, Kavanaugh
Ukraine under martial law
Coronavirus quarantine
Fauci, vaccine
Afghanistan forever war
I can’t take this anymore!
Seems to me like they missed a few things.
I mean, given the original, I think it should follow the basic idea of chronology. And, I agree with you, the flow or general prosody of the piece is lacking. I don’t mind straying from the source material’s prosody, but it just sounds weak and unpolished here to my ears. That said, I don’t care for the original, and I don’t care for Fall Out Boy, so I may not have the most unbiased opinion (though I am trying.)
I checked out about halfway through. Changing it from a chronological list to a grab bag of events ruined the flow for me. Also the rhyming wasn’t great which was surprising since they weren’t constrained by keeping events in order.
I guess there were fewer headscratch references to Soviet tennis players from 1956 or whatever but that’s also a function of my age.
Obama
Spielberg
Explosion Lebanon
The Spielberg reference is odd - he’s been famous since the ‘70s, so why is he mentioned after Obama?
The fact that Joel’s original was in chronological order meant he had to get creative with the rhyming references and gave the song a kind of…suspense, I guess? This version’s haphazard structure makes the whole thing kind of pointless.
I too gave up halfway through.
I know of Fall Out Boy from only one song, “Uma Thurman,” but since that song’s pretty damn awesome, I was willing to give this a listen.
Like everyone else, I think it needed to be chronological rather than bouncing back and forth all over the past 35 years.
And another thing: an attitude of lot of younger people back in the 1980s was that the 1950s were boring, and Billy Joel was responding to that with WDSTF, hence its focus on the pre-Beatles post-WWII era, with only a very quick trip through the subsequent two decades.
Absent that constraint, there’s no reason why Fall Out Boy couldn’t have shifted their emphasis more towards more recent stuff. Pre-9/11, just hit the most major political and cultural events like the Gulf War, Kurt Cobain, O.J., OKC, Lewinsky, Bush v. Gore, and have more room for more recent events.
Hear, hear. Didn’t like the original, and FOB has not improved it.
That doesn’t scan very well.
The original had pacing problems as well. Almost all the stuff from the 1970s and 1980s was crammed into one little verse, but Billy Joel spent multiple verses listing stuff from the 1950s and 1960s.
I think that was on purpose - moving faster and faster through the years, it made it feel like events were accelerating towards some kind of climax.
Plus, the idea that “it’s always been burning” means it made more sense to focus on the past rather than recent (at the time) events.
Jesus, that’s even worse than the original. I blame myself for listening to it even after I saw it was a Fall Out Boy cover of a Billy Joel song. That’s like the equivalent of a red flag.
I like Fall Out Boy well enough, but this isn’t a great cover. For my 9th grade history course, we had to come up with our own lyrics to “We Didn’t Star the Fire.” I like the original song, but I don’t care to hear Fall Out Boy’s version.
I would have sworn Joel released the song between 1980-1983, but color me surprised to see 1989. It’s amazing how the memory plays tricks on you sometimes.
You don’t know Immortals from Big Hero 6?
I think the original song is okay. I don’t know it that well. If it’s true that it starts pre-WW II to intentionally address the lie that things used to be better, cool. That’s at least trying to say something.
What is this cover trying to say? “Shit’s crazy, am I right?” Listing a bunch of political and pop culture things without any context kind of undermines the reality that there is a reason for these things and specific people to blame. Like it’s all just happening to us and will keep happening and gosh there’s nothing we can do. Which I admit fits the modern zeitgeist pretty well.
I agree it should be chronological and the flow seems pretty low-effort.
The song was aimed at people who thought the immediate post-WWII era was a boring period when nothing much happened. So it’s basically year by year from 1946-63, but a quick zip through 1964-198x, for whichever 198x the song was written in.
Didn’t know there was a “Big Hero N” for any value of N. 