Maybe Fall Out Boy Did Start the Fire

Photo: Burak Cingi/Redferns

You probably haven’t thought about Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” since your high-school history class. But trust that Pete Wentz has. His band Fall Out Boy just released a remake of Joel’s hyperreferential hit, stringing together new references from 1989 to 2023, the years since the song came out. And it’s all thanks to Wentz’s own odd obsession. “I thought about this song a lot when I was younger,” the songwriter and bassist tweeted. “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.”

Fun is certainly a word for it. Incendiary might be a better one as Fall Out Boy’s version has already started a number of internet fires. That includes annoyance over the band’s decision to not list historical events chronologically like Joel once did with the first moments of the new take jumping from “Captain Planet” (1990–96) to “Arab Spring” (2010–12) back to “L.A. Riots / Rodney King” (1992). And let’s face it, some of their references are reaches. Just all of “Spielberg”? They really like “Metroid” that much? And “Bobbitt, John”?! No, we can’t take it anymore! (It’s also worth noting that Joel famously hates his own version, which he’s said has a “terrible” melody like “a dentist’s drill.”)

If you manage to get past that, it is kind of fun to hear the Boys rhyme “Crimean Peninsula” with “Cambridge Analytica” and get in a joke about their pop-punk buddy Tom DeLonge’s obsession with aliens. Until, at least, you remember that the 1975 already did an even better 21st-century “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”