My Chemical Romance knew what they were doing. A friend of mine made the mistake of getting me started on this topic one time when I was in college. Picture us crammed into a dorm room, hunched over a school-issued laptop, scrubbing through the video for “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” on YouTube. I’m trying desperately to explain the brilliance of the song’s bridge—it’s the way Gerard Way’s unbridled emotion takes him from a whisper to a scream to a ragged half-shout: “I’m OK now, but you really need to listen to me / Because I’m telling you the truth! / I mean this, I’m OK!” Smash-cut to the deadpan: “Trust me.” Setup, punchline. Way taps into a genuine feeling (and that includes the sarcastic button on the end of it), but in breaking the tension he also breaks the fourth wall of the song to let you know that he knows that what he’s doing is ridiculous.
I thought about this recently when I saw the critical backlash to Fall Out Boy’s latest single, a track that helpfully spells out its premise on its own cover artwork: “A Fall Out Boy cover of the Billy Joel song ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ covering newsworthy items from 1989-2023.” This idea is exactly as bad as it sounds; it’s a tortured social media joke gone too far, and a few weeks after its release, it holds a well-earned 1.15 out of 5 on Rate Your Music. Other writers have thoroughly picked apart its flaws (rhyming George Floyd with Metroid is just the most obvious), but I don’t see the point in over-thinking it. The cover is, on its face, cringe. It’s as much second-hand embarrassment as you can pack into three and a half minutes. It’s the kind of thing Lin-Manuel Miranda would do (and has done, substituting podcast in-jokes for current events). It’s also the latest, most compact emblem of my begrudging love of Fall Out Boy’s post-hiatus output.
I’m not an early-years purist by any means, but it may be instructive to think about where the band came from. Starting with their unexpected breakout on 2005’s From Under the Cork Tree, Fall Out Boy always had their own complicated relationship with the line between good taste and bad. One of their great assets was the way they pushed at the line between what they could do and what they should. Even next to their Warped Tour peers, they had a willingness to be emotionally honest to the point of embarrassment. Sometimes that meant indulging an outward, juvenile meanness, as on “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” (Pete Wentz’s lyrics were wordy enough to get away with it), but it also meant getting too introspectively raw—and I’m not just projecting. As the band’s frequent producer Neal Avron recounted in a 2021 interview, Wentz recorded the spoken-word poem that closes “Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying” in a bathroom off the studio control room to avoid having everyone look at him in the main vocal booth.
The cover is, on its face, cringe. It’s as much second-hand embarrassment as you can pack into three and a half minutes. It’s the kind of thing Lin-Manuel Miranda would do.
This is the mall-emo ideal, and one thing that makes it so easy for its naysayers to dismiss. What this music asks of the people who make and consume it is to confront the part of themselves that wants to cringe, wants to stop and ask, “Is this too much?” And to answer, “No.” Or if not “No,” then “Yes, but the catharsis will be worth it. Trust me.” As a tired high school senior, listening to Folie à Deux on repeat while I applied to colleges and felt, not for the last time, like I was “Coming apart at the seams / Pitching myself for leads in other people’s dreams,” I was enraptured by this—the fact that someone like Wentz could write a sentiment so nakedly overdramatic, and share it with someone like Patrick Stump, who could deliver it with absolute, shameless conviction. The risk of cringe-worthiness was very much the point.
I graduated in 2013, which also turned out to be the year Fall Out Boy reunited, abandoning emotional risk-taking—I’ve long imagined—and pouring their shamelessness into the pursuit of pop excess and fun. All I can say with authority is that very little of their second act has connected with me on a personal level beneath the consistent hooks and one-liners. That even goes for this year’s So Much (for) Stardust, an album Stump teased as the kind of record they would’ve made if they’d never taken a hiatus. “Love From the Other Side” is transcendent symphonic rock, and I hope some teenager somewhere is currently soundtracking a Jujutsu Kaisen AMV with it. But the record also emotes in half-measures. It’s got a classic Wentz poem, but it’s overshadowed in the tracklist by another spoken-word segment, which is just a re-recorded Ethan Hawke monologue lifted from Reality Bites (no studio bathroom required).
To hear Wentz tell it, though, Fall Out Boy still comes away from every project feeling like they took swings. As he put it in one interview on Stardust, “Every time before we put out a record or put out a song, I call the night before, and I’m like, ‘I’m not sure we should be doing this.’” Enter “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” something they definitely shouldn’t have done. When you approach everything like you might get fired for it—even as a band that, at their lowest points critically, has never had an album sell below RIAA Gold—you’re bound to miss the mark sometimes and mess up so badly that even your fans won’t defend it.
This principle is what makes Stardust one of my most-played records of the year in spite of its flaws, and what lodged “We Didn’t Start the Fire” so firmly in my brain. The threshold for risk in Fall Out Boy's music has moved with age (as well it should), but maybe covering everyone’s least favorite Billy Joel song is just a safer, more grown up version of airing out your most embarrassing feelings. It’s the “Tired of Sex” to “Africa” pipeline established by their Hella Mega Tour-mate Rivers Cuomo.
When you approach everything like you might get fired for it, you’re bound to miss the mark sometimes and mess up so badly that even your fans won’t defend it.
When I saw Fall Out Boy this month at their sold-out show at Jiffy Lube Live amphitheater in Bristow, Virginia—just a mile off the road I used to take to school blasting “Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes”—Wentz offered another, more existential explanation for the cover. You basically already won the lottery by being born, he said, so why not just do anything? Why not follow every creative whim to its endpoint? Stump interjected to point out that they knew, by the way, that the events they included in the song were out of chronological order, that they intended it that way in order to convey the chaotic feeling of the times. Fair enough, but the issue is even more obvious than that.
This isn’t going to be one of those situations where I drag you into my dorm room and try to convince you that, actually, this cover is secretly great and you just don’t see where it’s coming from. Where it’s coming from is clear—it’s proof that, on their own terms, Fall Out Boy still wrestles with cringe, and that at times, cringe wrestles back. What I can say in favor of “A Fall Out Boy cover of the Billy Joel Song” is that watching my wife’s horrified face journey as she heard it for the first time played over the amphitheater PA before the concert was a highlight of the evening. That was funny—I’m just not sure Fall Out Boy is in on that joke. FL
