"We Didn't Start the Fire," Updated for 2023



Billy Joel released the song "We Didn't Start the Fire" in the fall of 1989. It was a list of 118 newsworthy events that happened between 1949 and 1989, set to music. Joel himself didn't think much of the tune, but the song went to #1, and was quite meaningful to his fellow Baby Boomers.

Today, we have a new version that's almost like a sequel. Fall Out Boy released a cover of the song with lyrics that list things that happened between 1989 and 2023. There's a lot of them. The song has received mixed reviews so far. Some people love it because it contains what Millennials have experienced. Others criticized the song because the events aren't at all in chronological order, and some major things were omitted, like the Covid-19 pandemic and the fall of the Soviet Union. The lyrics are in the music video, and also listed at the YouTube page.  -via Digg


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In discussions of this song, a lot of younger people talk about how their history teachers used the Billy Joel song to teach about the 20th century, hence the importance of the events being in chronological order. I had no idea. The only reason I memorized it was because I played it twice a shift.
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Personally, I would have just altered the original document to make it seem the same, but unworkable...

Perhaps even add a little something to make it dangerous to anyone trying to make the recipe.
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Reminds me about a conspiracy theory I heard about the Anarchist's Handbook one time. The original book that came out in like the 70's had some recipes in it that would not work. There were some of the explosive recipes that would be extremely dangerous to try to do. Some made products that were so unstable that safe handling was almost impossible and you were pretty much guaranteed to blow yourself up if you tried it. The conspiracy theory I had heard was that the U.S. government was behind the book. The wrote it and made it known so anyone who wanted to do harm would take themselves out of the playing field. Of course, if you read about the history of the book you find that the odds of this conspiracy theory being true are pretty low.
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Not that hacking some website (and alerting the media at large) is going to stop terrorism, but let's pretend for the sake of, I dunno, comedy.
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