Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 the week that Taylor Swift was born in December 1989. Now, Swift gets a name-check in Fall Out Boy’s smart cover of the song released Wednesday (June 28).
Joel’s track was a cascade of news and pop-culture headlines from the middle of the 20th Century to 1989. Fall Out Boy updated the tune with a similar jumble of news and tabloid references from 1989 to the present. Swift is mentioned in tandem with Kanye West, who shared a moment at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards that will live in awards show infamy.
Other music names and moments that are chronicled in the fast-moving new cover include three icons who have died since 1989 – Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson and Prince – plus Woodstock ’99, Fyre Fest, Black Parade and this provocative assertion: “YouTube killed MTV.”
Other pop-culture references include Harry Potter, Twilight, Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man, Michael Keaton in Batman, Steven Spielberg, Stranger Things, Avatar, SpongeBob SquarePants, Pokemon and MySpace.
Fall Out Boy structured the song the same way Joel did, steadily building in intensity. Where Joel built to the dramatic line “JFK blown away/ What else do I have to say?,” Fall Out Boy built to “World Trade/ second plane/ What else do I have to say?” Indeed, 9/11 is probably the most stunning historical event since 1989, just as President Kennedy’s assassination was for the previous time frame.
Where Joel sang “Rock and roll/ the cola wars/I can’t take it anymore,” Fall out Boy offers “Bush v. Gore/ I can’t take it anymore.”
The most memorable coupling in the new song may be “Trump gets impeached twice/ Polar bears got no ice.”
Joel’s original version reached No. 1 on Dec. 9, 1989, dethroning Milli Vanilli’s pre-scandal smash “Blame It on the Rain.” It held the top position for two weeks before being dethroned by Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise.”
Joel performed the song on the 32nd Annual Grammy Awards in February 1990, where it received three high-profile nominations – record and song of the year and best pop male vocal performance.
But Joel has been critical of the song, noting it is one of the few songs he has ever written where he wrote the lyrics first and then put them to music. In 1993, when discussing the song with documentary filmmaker David Horn, Joel said, “It’s really not much of a song … If you take the melody by itself, terrible. Like a dentist drill.”
There have been several parodies and takeoffs of the song, including The Simpsons’ parody “They’ll Never Stop the Simpsons” at the end of the 2002 “Gump Roast” episode.
Pop band Milo Greene performed the song in June 2013 for The A.V. Club‘s A.V. Undercover series.
In 2019, the cast of Avengers: Endgame recapped the entire Marvel franchise by singing their own superhero version of the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The elaborate sequence involved stars Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Mark Ruffalo, Paul Rudd, Danai Gurira, Karen Gillan and Brie Larson.
Fall Out Boy has written the vast majority of their 20 Hot 100 hits, but the group had a big hit in 2008 with a cover version of Jackson’s “Beat It,” which featured John Mayer. (The song reached No. 18 on the Hot 100 in April 2008, 14 months before Jackson’s shocking death at age 50.)
Fall Out Boy is currently on their So Much for (Tour) Dust global headline tour, in support of its eighth studio album, So Much (for) Stardust, which became the group’s seventh album to reach the top 10 on the Billboard 200. The band has topped that chart four times with Infinity on High (2007), Save Rock and Roll (2013), American Beauty/American Psycho (2015) and MANIA (2018).
The band’s tour launched with a sold-out hometown show at Wrigley Field in Chicago, and continues Wednesday in Dallas, along with stops in Phoenix, San Diego and two sold-out stadium shows in Los Angeles at BMO Stadium (formerly Banc of California Stadium) on July 2-3. For all tour dates and details, visit Fall Out Boy’s website.
