What the [expletive], Fall Out Boy?
This is a sentence I never thought I’d say, let alone write on a website with USA TODAY in the url. Yet, here we are. This is what I am reduced to. Fall Out Boy decided to cover Billy Joel.
Apologies, Fall Out Boy decided to cover the worst Billy Joel song, at least in the corners of his catalog where he does not pretend to be a Vietnam War veteran.
Apologies again, Fall Out Boy decided to update the worst Billy Joel song and make it about the past 30 years.
Geez, sorry, it’s taking me a minute to wrap my head around this. So, Fall Out Boy decided to update and somehow make worse the worst Billy Joel song and make it about whatever viral stuff Fall Out Boy could think of and/or find by Wikipedia’ing each decade.
That’s right. Fall Out Boy, that band that shows up at various televised sporting events to make the world say, “hey, they still exist” before changing the channel, has cursed us with an updated version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
You may be thinking to yourself, “wow, that sounds like an awful song.” But you’re wrong.
Let’s be clear. This is not a song. This is a 1990s 7th-grade history assignment. I know this because I had to do it. I know this because the lyrics are EXACTLY as bad as if an edgy 13-year-old had written them. And like an angsty young teenager with attention deficit disorder, THEY CAN’T EVEN STICK TO A CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.
Captain Planet, Arab Spring
LA Riots Rodney King
Deep fakes, earthquakes
Iceland volcano
Oklahoma City bomb
Kurt Cobain, Pokémon
Tiger Woods, MySpace
Monsanto GMOs
That was the one rule Billy Joel made! Each verse was roughly one decade in American history. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” has all the musical complexity of a nursery rhyme. These bozos failed to master even that.
But yes, those are actual lyrics. The opening lyrics, in fact.
In a way, it was nice for Fall Out Boy to let us know right away that this is not a serious song. Unnecessary, certainly, because it is Fall Out Boy singing “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but appreciated. You hear “Captain Planet” and think “hey, joke song!” And then you hear “Arab Spring” and, after recoiling so hard you suffer low-grade whiplash you understand that, yes, this is exactly the D- junior high essay you’d expected.
There are four verses, each containing two stanzas of lyrics. Picking out a worst is like finding the tallest tree from the floor of a redwood forest. Each is a titan, a true sigil of tone-deafness screaming at the world “we’ve made too much money.” Each is its own frontal lobe analgesic.
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
Please take a minute to let the screaming inside your brain die down to a low rumble.
You’ll also notice the rhyme scheme of the original comes and goes as Fall Out Boy pleases, discarded in the artistic choice of dropping “balloon boy” in between “war on terror” and “bombing Boston marathon”. Instead, the focus is on getting the syllable count right to hit all the staccato Billy Joel deliveries that helped the original become a four-decade ear worm. Of course, they don’t get that exactly right either but, again, no one is going to notice because THESE DOOFUSES WENT FROM TERRORISM TO BALLOON BOY TO TERRORISM AGAIN IN A SPAN OF FOUR SECONDS.
I’m not sure I can express how unnecessary this is. It is The Emoji Movie, slathered with a thicker layer of millennial nostalgia and an even worse attention span. It only makes sense as some brilliant distraction to keep us from finding out all the awful things Fall Out Boy has actually done.
When the archaeologists of future civilizations dig up our society, this is what they will point to when explaining our demise. This is the song Nero fiddled as Rome burned. It is an ouroboros of shame, eating itself from the inside out and, thus, never sating itself as a horrified public looks on.
This is Gal Gadot’s celebrity-addled “Imagine” video from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s a facile examination of the world from idiots wholly unqualified to make any statement about it. It’s a twee piece of fluff no one asked for. It exists only to be mocked. It is a band, its management and its label, teaming together to show the whole world its collective ass.
Some songs lift you up. Inspire you. Cause you to reflect on yourself, your surroundings and what you’re capable of.
Fall Out Boy’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is not that. It is a stark reminder that our world is persistently getting worse and that it’s no longer fun to live here.
