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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jan 28, 2024 7:54:20 GMT -5
I think it’s bad. “Golden State…Killer got caught” is one of those lines that’s so transcendently bad that I will be thinking about it on a near constant basis for the remainder of my life.
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Post by Dr. Rumak on Jan 28, 2024 8:03:49 GMT -5
Mods don't have to shut down the thread, but they should move it to the music board where it belongs.
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Post by Celebith on Jan 28, 2024 21:39:35 GMT -5
Orance.
and / or
Hodor
aren't Fallout Boy cancelled? The original we didn't star is pretty awful, so I think that we can safely cancel them over an update, if they weren't already. I don't want or need to hear it.
ETA: 1- moved the thread per Dr. R's request. 2-I googled the lyrics and what a random assortment of shit. At least Joel organized things chronologically.
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Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Jan 29, 2024 8:42:36 GMT -5
This new version is so bad that it actually makes me happy to hear the original playing on the local Jack FM station.
Full disclosure: I've never listened to Fallout Boy on purpose in my entire life and was horrified when a longtime friend assumed I was a huge fan like she is. Even SHE thinks the song is awful.
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LazBro
Prolific Poster 
Posts: 10,019 
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Post by LazBro on Jan 29, 2024 8:57:18 GMT -5
I AM a Fall Out Boy fan, and I am not at all ashamed of that. FOB's four-record run from Take This to Your Grave to Folie a Deux remains the shining achievement of 2000's pop punk. They have the best discography by miles, even as their more recent releases don't live up.
But you can't polish a turd. It's an insufferable cover of an insufferable song, and I feel physically agitated when it comes on the radio (which thankfully, its airplay already seems to be slowing way, way down).
I voted "Yes", because of course we can discuss it. Why else keep this creaking dinosaur of a forum alive?
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Post by Celebith on Jan 29, 2024 11:15:33 GMT -5
I AM a Fall Out Boy fan, and I am not at all ashamed of that. FBO's four-record run from Take This to Your Grave to Folie a Deux remains the shining achievement of 2000's pop punk. They have the best discography by miles, even as their more recent releases don't live up.
But you can't polish a turd. It's an insufferable cover of an insufferable song, and I feel physically agitated when it comes on the radio (which thankfully, its airplay already seems to be slowing way, way down).
I voted "Yes", because of course we can discuss it. Why else keep this creaking dinosaur of a forum alive?
I mean, I voted no but discussed it anyway, so it's not like our votes matter |
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Post by Jimmy James on Jan 29, 2024 19:28:15 GMT -5
It's a dogshit cover a song everyone including Billy Joel agrees wasn't that good to begin with by a band that has always sucked but has gone on sucking for so long that they have to open up new previously undreamt-of frontiers of suckitude. That one biting off the Munsters' song was them entering the 2001: A Space Oddity stargate to a newer, suckier dimension, and now they have gone beyond. They are now returning across time and space like Dave Bowman as a thumb-sucking starchild to elevate debase humanity to their sucky level. It's a fucking lazy, random listing of things without the chronological ordering of the original, as Celebith rightly objects. You could excuse that if they fudged the ordering to get better meter or rhymes, but that aspect is shit too. Fucking Fermi Paradox? That's not an event that occurred between 1989 and 2023. That's not even an event, it's not even the right type of wrong thing. That's a philosophical question raised by a physicist who died in (checks notes) 1954. You want to know why alien civilizations haven't contacted us? Because we send radio transmissions of songs like this. |
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Post by Nudeviking on Jan 29, 2024 19:31:19 GMT -5
So back in my youth I had a pretty terrible history teacher for my state mandated US History class. She was not particularly skilled at teaching but was a winning field hockey coach or some such nonsense. Anyway as the date for our New York State Regents Exam in History approached it became increasingly clear that we were not going to get through any of the Cold War since we had just started the Korean War and there were mere days left of school and so on the last day of classes before final exams began this teacher brought in a boombox and a stack of photocopies. She passed the papers around the room and explained that since we didn't get through the material we were supposed to cover she was going to give us a crash course on the roughly 30 some-odd years of US History we had missed out on. She then hit play on the boombox and Billiam Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" began to play.
I mention all this because to me one of the biggest sins of the Fall Out Boy version of the song is that it does away with the one thing that made the Bill Joel version kind of clever (and also useful to ill-prepared high school sports coaches who are being made to teach history) namely that it's largely in chronological order. The Fall Out Boy one is completely scattershot jumping around from something that happened in 1994 to an event from 2022 to something that would have fallen in the period covered in the original version. It's easy to take roughly 40 years of historical events and getting them to fit a song's rhyme scheme if you give zero fucks about chronological order. Big Bill, on the other hand, went that extra mile and figured out to get the Cola Wars to not only be mentioned in the part of the song covering the early 80s but got it to rhyme with other mentions of other contemporary events which is a billion times more impressive than rhyming "George Floyd" with "Metroid."
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jan 29, 2024 21:00:14 GMT -5
So back in my youth I had a pretty terrible history teacher for my state mandated US History class. She was not particularly skilled at teaching but was a winning field hockey coach or some such nonsense. Anyway as the date for our New York State Regents Exam in History approached it became increasingly clear that we were not going to get through any of the Cold War since we had just started the Korean War and there were mere days left of school and so on the last day of classes before final exams began this teacher brought in a boombox and a stack of photocopies. She passed the papers around the room and explained that since we didn't get through the material we were supposed to cover she was going to give us a crash course on the roughly 30 some-odd years of US History we had missed out on. She then hit play on the boombox and Billiam Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" began to play. I mention all this because to me one of the biggest sins of the Fall Out Boy version of the song is that it does away with the one thing that made the Bill Joel version kind of clever (and also useful to ill-prepared high school sports coaches who are being made to teach history) namely that it's largely in chronological order. The Fall Out Boy one is completely scattershot jumping around from something that happened in 1994 to an event from 2022 to something that would have fallen in the period covered in the original version. It's easy to take roughly 40 years of historical events and getting them to fit a song's rhyme scheme if you give zero fucks about chronological order. Big Bill, on the other hand, went that extra mile and figured out to get the Cola Wars to not only be mentioned in the part of the song covering the early 80s but got it to rhyme with other mentions of other contemporary events which is a billion times more impressive than rhyming "George Floyd" with "Metroid." Another problem is its half-assed commitment to themed verses. Like the verse with George Floyd also mentions Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Columbine and Sandy Hook. School shootings and cops murdering people of color are both examples of horrible things that the US has been reckoning with for much of the period of time covered by the song. But then Fall Out Boy are like “let’s mention Metroid in this verse too” and it just feels really distasteful to be mentioning these serious subjects in conjunction with a video game series (which also started in 1986, during the period covered by Joel’s original). I don’t like Billy Joel’s original version either, but his chronological treatment is clearly deliberately juxtaposing the trivial and the serious in a way that’s intended to underscore what it’s like to live in a world where one is presented with some awful atrocity one minute and then some silly piece of pop culture ephemera the next. Also, scanning the lyrics, the only video game mentioned is the Metroid series, which is really weird, because much as I like Metroid, I do not view it as the definitive video game franchise of the past 35 years. The song isn’t even good at coming up with the most iconic examples of pop culture nonsense since 1989. |
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Post by Nudeviking on Jan 29, 2024 21:07:28 GMT -5
So back in my youth I had a pretty terrible history teacher for my state mandated US History class. She was not particularly skilled at teaching but was a winning field hockey coach or some such nonsense. Anyway as the date for our New York State Regents Exam in History approached it became increasingly clear that we were not going to get through any of the Cold War since we had just started the Korean War and there were mere days left of school and so on the last day of classes before final exams began this teacher brought in a boombox and a stack of photocopies. She passed the papers around the room and explained that since we didn't get through the material we were supposed to cover she was going to give us a crash course on the roughly 30 some-odd years of US History we had missed out on. She then hit play on the boombox and Billiam Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" began to play. I mention all this because to me one of the biggest sins of the Fall Out Boy version of the song is that it does away with the one thing that made the Bill Joel version kind of clever (and also useful to ill-prepared high school sports coaches who are being made to teach history) namely that it's largely in chronological order. The Fall Out Boy one is completely scattershot jumping around from something that happened in 1994 to an event from 2022 to something that would have fallen in the period covered in the original version. It's easy to take roughly 40 years of historical events and getting them to fit a song's rhyme scheme if you give zero fucks about chronological order. Big Bill, on the other hand, went that extra mile and figured out to get the Cola Wars to not only be mentioned in the part of the song covering the early 80s but got it to rhyme with other mentions of other contemporary events which is a billion times more impressive than rhyming "George Floyd" with "Metroid." Another problem is its half-assed commitment to themed verses. Like the verse with George Floyd also mentions Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Columbine and Sandy Hook. School shootings and cops murdering people of color are both examples of horrible things that the US has been reckoning with for much of the period of time covered by the song. But then Fall Out Boy are like “let’s mention Metroid in this verse too” and it just feels really distasteful to be mentioning these serious subjects in conjunction with a video game series (which also started in 1986, during the period covered by Joel’s original). I don’t like Billy Joel’s original version either, but his chronological treatment is clearly deliberately juxtaposing the trivial and the serious in a way that’s intended to underscore what it’s like to live in a world where one is presented with some awful atrocity one minute and then some silly piece of pop culture ephemera the next. Also, scanning the lyrics, the only video game mentioned is the Metroid series, which is really weird, because much as I like Metroid, I do not view it as the definitive video game franchise of the past 35 years. The song isn’t even good at coming up with the most iconic examples of pop culture nonsense since 1989. The Metroid thing as a "we just need something that rhymes with Floyd" also sucks because "opioid" was right there and was (and still is) an issue that first would have better fit the time period the song was supposed to be covering and second wouldn't have come across like a punchline to a terrible joke after listing off a bunch of horrible shit. |
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Post by Celebith on Jan 29, 2024 21:58:52 GMT -5
Also, scanning the lyrics, the only video game mentioned is the Metroid series, which is really weird, because much as I like Metroid, I do not view it as the definitive video game franchise of the past 35 years. The song isn’t even good at coming up with the most iconic examples of pop culture nonsense since 1989. The Metroid thing as a "we just need something that rhymes with Floyd" also sucks because "opioid" was right there and was (and still is) an issue that first would have better fit the time period the song was supposed to be covering and second wouldn't have come across like a punchline to a terrible joke after listing off a bunch of horrible shit. Metroidvania would have been a good substitution for Beatlemania, and at least a little clever. I'm surprised at how much I'm able to hate a song I haven't even listened to. |
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Rainbow Rosa
TI Forumite
not gay, just colorful
Posts: 3,604 
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Post by Rainbow Rosa on Jan 29, 2024 22:47:04 GMT -5
I think the line "Unabomber - Bobbitt, John - bombing Boston Marathon" would make a great premise for an alt-history novel.
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Post by Celebith on Jan 30, 2024 0:03:31 GMT -5
I think the line "Unabomber - Bobbitt, John - bombing Boston Marathon" would make a great premise for an alt-history novel. (courtesy of McSweeny's) 5. What if your cock was a bomb?
...
21. Bomb Cock 2: Mutually Assured Destruction
...
49. Bomb Cock 3: World War Chindo |
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Post by Ben Grimm on Jan 30, 2024 14:42:32 GMT -5
It's days like today I'm most thankful for some of the holes in my musical knowledge.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Jan 30, 2024 23:53:46 GMT -5
What I'm getting from this thread is Billy Joel is a decent lyricist and maybe his song wasn't so bad after all?
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Post by Nudeviking on Jan 31, 2024 3:41:47 GMT -5
What I'm getting from this thread is Billy Joel is a decent lyricist and maybe his song wasn't so bad after all? He's only a decent lyricist if you're a JV field hockey coach/US history teacher who forgot to teach any of the Cold War and needed to get kids up to speed the day before finals began. |
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Post by Some Kind of Munster on Jan 31, 2024 11:52:18 GMT -5
You guys will be happy(?) to know that lazy teachers are still using this song to attempt to teach history – my kid came home from school earlier this year complaining about having the stupid chorus stuck in her head after her history teacher played it in class. When I asked her if it was the Billy Joel or Fallout Boy version they listened to she didn't know, because to a 12-year-old Billy Joel and Fallout Boy are equally irrelevant
(For my part, I haven't heard the Fallout Boy version and it's been literal decades since I heard the Billy Joel so I couldn't really remember enough of the lyrics to ask follow up questions)
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Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Jan 31, 2024 11:58:18 GMT -5
What I'm getting from this thread is Billy Joel is a decent lyricist and maybe his song wasn't so bad after all? He's only a decent lyricist if you're a JV field hockey coach/US history teacher who forgot to teach any of the Cold War and needed to get kids up to speed the day before finals began. I used to think that was a joke until I was reminiscing with my mom a few months ago, who taught at the K-8 school I attended. She mentioned that I was lucky to get the teacher I had for middle-school history because it had been the gym teacher until I was in fourth grade. The gym teacher's primary teaching methods for history class, aside from just making everyone read the textbook on their own with zero discussion, were filmstrips that the school acquired during the 1970s and culminating in "We Didn't Start the Fire."
That would have absolutely driven me crazy as a kid who loved history.
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Post by ganews on Feb 14, 2024 14:20:01 GMT -5
My opinions of Fall Out Boy are:
1) solid band name
2) had a couple of not-unlistenable songs on the radio in the mid-2000s
3) their song called "Uma Thurman" sucked the one time I heard it, but if it was written with the express purpose of finding a way to meet Uma Thurman I can respect that
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Rainbow Rosa
TI Forumite
not gay, just colorful
Posts: 3,604
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Post by Rainbow Rosa on Feb 15, 2024 0:54:14 GMT -5
EXTREMELY ROSA COMMENT ALERT!!!!!
I like the Fall Out Boy song that is just Patrick Stump and some no-name girl singing along to "Tom's Diner."
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Post by Nudeviking on Feb 19, 2024 3:10:14 GMT -5
EXTREMELY ROSA COMMENT ALERT!!!!!I like the Fall Out Boy song that is just Patrick Stump and some no-name girl singing along to "Tom's Diner." She has a name! It's |
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Post by Nudeviking on Feb 19, 2024 3:16:44 GMT -5
...Lolo. She also sang on a song by PANIC!!!!!! at the disco. called, "Miss Jackson," and stared in the weird emo rom-com that has too many pro-wrestlers in it, (Romance) in the Digital Age.
This is all information I knew off the top of my head.
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LazBro
Prolific Poster
Posts: 10,019
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Post by LazBro on Feb 19, 2024 8:51:25 GMT -5
EXTREMELY ROSA COMMENT ALERT!!!!!I like the Fall Out Boy song that is just Patrick Stump and some no-name girl singing along to "Tom's Diner." In our house that song ("Centuries") is called "Fight Guys", because its music video features the Fall Out Men as Roman gladiators battling in the Colosseum, and that's how my young son at the time started requesting it. Even in the car, all the time, asking to listen to "Fight Guys."
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