Move Over, Gal Gadot’s “Imagine”! There’s a new instantly iconic cover song in town. on Wednesday, Fall Out Boy released an update of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. which aims to cover “newsworthy items” that have occurred since original song1989 release of. We, the staff of the online magazine Slate (not mentioned in the song?!), have some notes. Thirty three of them to be exact.
1. First things first: Uncovering 34 years of American history “Captain Planet” A remarkable decision.
2. However, fair is fair; The original begins with “Harry Truman,” and the disparity between them says something poignant about American decline.
3. “Bobbitt, John” “Blanchett, Kate, you’re a genius!” Reminds me a lot of. From doomed ariana debos rap, To be honest, if you’re using last name, first name to make the rhyme work, take it off.
4. It appears from the video of the song that Kurt Cobain has a cedilla in his name, it is pronounced “Kurt Cobain” as if it is pronounced “Soben”, perhaps after Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” in context. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the cedilla actually emphasizes “Pokémon” because of the great distance in the line. Still: Sloppy!
5. Speaking of sloppiness, there are too many syntactical errors in this song, all kinds of tense verse-justifications that really hurt the ears. “Exploded Lebanon”? “Texas Failed Electric Grid”? “Robert Downey Jr. iron Man, Buy some prepositions, Fall Out Boy!
6. We know the whole point of the song is a fusion of the cataclysmic and the trivial — the original pairing “Juan Perón” and “Dacron” — but Fall Out Boy’s choice of rhyme in this couplet is memorably chaotic:
unbomber, bobbitt, john
Boston Marathon Bombing
7. Say what you want about 1975, but “If We Made It Love It” The “Let’s take a look at your craziness of the last few decades” situation has already been handled properly.
8. Basically, covering “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is EXTREMELY OVER! Freakin’ jimmy fallon already did it, This has been a moaning lie on Twitter since 2015!
9. Who are we talking about… no mention of Twitter? or facebook? or Zuck? or tiktok? However, MySpace gets a line.
10. Yeah, yeah, looking at this thrown-together list of random things and indignant history-based “Where’s…?” Giving voice to is a fool’s game. Objections. But where’s Beyoncé?
11. The only rapper on this list is Kanye West?!
12. Where’s OJ Simpson?!?
13. Where are the simpson,
14. Where is Titanic,
15. Where is “dankugene”??!?!?!?!?
16. Where is Monica Lewinsky!!?!?!?!?!?????!?
17. Huge missed opportunity to rhyme “Red Wedding” and, as such, “Twitter threading”.
18. Fall Out Boy writes an entire song about recent history and contains no reference to “quarantine,” or “pandemic,” or “coronavirus” (rhymes with “Miley Cyrus”, for what it’s worth). Say what you will about Billy Joel’s historical prowess, but at least he left out the AIDS name!
19. It’s so funny that SpongeBob gets his own line.
20. My Chemical Romance’s Album Is Too Funny the black Parade considered worthy of inclusion in this list.
21. Not gonna lie, at least one person on Slate very nervously asked if the “Black Parade” was a made-up reference to Black Lives Matter. We will not put it past them!
22. Speaking of which… if one believes that the poem that includes “Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice” as well as “George Floyd” is a loosely defined Black Lives Matter segment, then Among them is the inclusion of LeBron James and Meghan Markle, like, a little uncomfortable.
23. “Shinzo Abe flew away” – Come on man.
24. Why is Metroid there? Metroid Was released in 1986!
25. Why at all fermi paradox in this song? The term refers to a 1950 conversation between Enrico Fermi and other physicists in which Fermi noted the gulf between the statistical likelihood of extraterrestrial life and the total lack of definitive evidence of aliens. That was the 1950’s! No one has solved the Fermi Paradox! We haven’t discovered aliens! Unless…isn’t this Fall Out Boy’s way of telling us that Pete Wentz has made contact with extraterrestrial life?
26. Which is the “Keaton Batman” that took Fall Out Boy to the edge? A better selection would have been “bat-nipples”. However, it’s hard to rhyme.
27. It’s nice that Steven Spielberg is included on this list, but you could argue that his greatest cultural relevance was to Boomers in the 1970s and ’80s.
28. Well, “Evergreen Swayze is a fun update of “The Trouble with Swayze”. We’ll give it to you, Fall Out Boy.
29. The white rhinoceros is not extinct! Northern the white rhinoceros is extinct, but South The white rhinoceros is still alive. Be more precise in your ecological pronouncements, Fall Out Boy!
30. “The Cubs go all the way again” doesn’t make sense. Nor “the polar bears can’t find the ice.” Just carry on with “Cubs and Sox break the curse / Global warming is getting worse”.
31. Where the Billy Joel original was written in roughly chronological order, moving through the boomer era from the 1940s to the 1980s, Fall Out Boy’s version is… uh… not. Take an example from the first verse: captain planet premiered in 1990; The Arab Spring was 2011; The LA riots took place in 1992; Deepfakes are essentially a contemporary phenomenon; “Earthquakes” happen all the time; And in 2010, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted, halting European air travel. To be honest, this song is totally fascinating from a historical perspective.
32. Billy Joel’s Origin Is Terrible—Even Joel’s Himself Compares its tune to a dentist’s drill—but it at least gives the impression of living through a significant amount of time, with events piling up on each other as the years go by. A fire, if you will, that continues to grow in size, continues to burn, and continues to grow. In contrast, this update sounds like a Google doc thrown together in 15 minutes by some aging millennial.
33. Why doesn’t this song end with this couplet referring to the most important event of 2023:
oppenheimer,barbie Day-
What more can I say!!!!
unforgivable.