I’m still irritated at how bad Fall Out Boy’s song is. I decided to take an hour or so to write one that’s not so shitty, just to demonstrate how little effort it would have taken to do something better. Mine’s not super-good or well-polished but in my opinion it’s already objectively better. I don’t have time to finish it, but it got most of the way there before I ran out of time.
I know this is probably just feeding into more publicity for their awful song, but in any case, enjoy:
Captain Planet, Clinton wins
L.A. riots, Rodney King
Single dads and latchkey kids
Myspace pages, eBay bids
Waco's burning, OJ's free
NAFTA took my job from me.
World wide web and Y2Ks
Spongebob Squarepants, Office Space
Napster, slashdot, internet
Dubya, tech jobs, pay the rent
Two twin towers up in flames
People jumping, fighter planes
Now my friends are goin' to war
What the fuck you lyin' for
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it but we're trying to fight it
War abroad and war at home
Mayhem in the superdome
Daily Show says Dubya lies
Patriot act, freedom fries
Obama's gonna save us now
Snowden, drones, gay marriage vows
Bankers stole the pension fund
Now the kids have all got guns
Housing crash recession hits
Black Lives Matter burning shit
Write an app for Android
Twitter, hashtags, opiods
Pussy Grabber's here to stay
Muslims banned and frogs are gay,
Global warming, COVID, try
To tell me we're not gonna die
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it but we're trying to fight it
Now we gotta stay inside
Zoom jobs, bread, you gotta try
To tell your uncle that it's real
Fox News told him how to feel
… and that’s all I got. See how easy it is though? You just have to make something that isn’t shitty.
I thought you were going to be bashing Billy Joel. Just stick to his version. You’ll be fine.
I hadn’t heard the FOB original. This inspired me to go check it out. You’re right, theirs is… Impressively bad. On top of most of the references just being a random selection of words that appeared in headlines (half of them meaningless even at the time), it doesn’t even flow musically.
Your version is way better.
And now to make it better, put them in order. Like Billy Joel did.
Are mine not in order? I didn’t check exact years but I didn’t think they were way off.
Also, yes, Billy Joel is the for real OG. That was actually the song that got me into him; I never heard of the guy and then saw that song on MTV hanging out with my friend and we were both blown away by it, so I got one of his albums.
Not as messy as the other version but yours aren’t.
Damn that was really good. I wouldn’t say that’s simple, I couldn’t have done it. Maybe you just found your industry :-)
