Fall Out Boy updates Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire'

Grammy-nominated rock band Fall Out Boy has updated Billy Joel’s classic “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” his 1989 No. 1 hit reciting four decades of historical milestones, with new lyrics focusing on subsequent decades to now.

“I thought about this song a lot when I was younger,” Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz, presumably, posted on the band’s social media Wednesday when the song went live. “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. Hope you like our take on it,” the post says, noting the song will also be released as a physical record limited to 5,000 copies.

A representative for the Hicksville-raised Joel told Newsday that the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer was aware of the updated song and delighted by it.

The new lyrics, which jump among years rather than presenting events and entities in progressive chronological order by decade, opens with the 1990s environmentalist superhero Captain Planet; the 2011 wave of Middle East political demonstrations known as the Arab Spring; the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of police officers caught on video beating an unarmed Rodney King; and the contemporary phenomenon of deepfakes, highly sophisticated manipulated media presenting realistic-looking falsehoods.

Included are such news events as the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building by domestic terrorists; the mass shootings of schoolchildren at Colorado's Columbine High School in 1999 and Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012; the U.K.’s 2016 “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union; ex-President Donald Trump’s two impeachments; and the 2021 Texas electric-grid failure.

Political figures mentioned include assassinated former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, ex-U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the late Queen Elizabeth II, North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un, former Vice President Al Gore and ex-Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — though not George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton or Joe Biden.

Among cultural touchstones are the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” supernatural-fantasy novels and their spinoffs; musicians Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, Prince, Taylor Swift and Kanye West; Netflix's “Stranger Things” and “Tiger King”; actors Robert Downey Jr. and Michael Keaton and their respective superhero movie characters Iron Man and Batman; sports figures Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, Venus and Serena Williams, Tiger Woods and the Chicago Cubs; and such miscellanea as Myspace, Pokémon, QAnon and Y2K.

Where the Billy Joel original finds itself at a loss for words over its timeframe’s arguably most pivotal event, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (“JFK / Blown away / What else do I have to say?”), Fall Out Boy’s update concludes with the devastating international terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, that toppled New York City’s Twin Towers (“World Trade / Second plane / What else do I have to say?”).

Fall Out Boy, formed in Illinois in 2001 and named after the character Fallout Boy on “The Simpsons,” has released several platinum albums and a handful of hit singles including “This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race” (2007) and “Centuries” (2014). The band has been nominated for two Grammy Awards.