“We Didn't Start the Scaling”

If you want to skip the narrative buildup and go straight to the songs and music videos, here you go. I’ve always had a soft spot for music that chronicles history. I have a core memory of walking into the first day of my 20th-century world history class: my teacher had turned down the lights and was playing “Russians” by Sting. A classic in the genre is, of course, Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, with its fast-paced chronicle of 1949–1989 via a series of rhyming allusions. A few months ago I was bopping along to the song in the bouldering gym, when I heard some unfamiliar lyrics: Nuclear accident, Fukushima Japan Crimean peninsula Cambridge Analytica Kim Jong Un Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man That doesn’t sound quite right… That’s when I found out Fall Out Boy had updated the song for the period 1989–2023. Wikipedia says it was critically panned, but I liked it: FOB was telling the story of my generation. The singularity era has given rise to an epidemic of “monitoring the…