Week 11: We didn't start the fire / it was always burning since the world's been turning

Hello everyone!!

This is the penultimate week how exciting… That being said, I unfortunately don’t have much to chat about for Week 11. It was largely me going over ideas and ideas and outline and outlines for my final presentation. This initial drafting stage (which also applies to my stories) is always the most laborious and least impressive haha.

What did I do?

My friends and advisors have given me some great suggestions on what i could do for a final presentation. I’ve had: 10 minutes of standup, be a news reporter, and play a character! i thought they were all really cool ideas and did end up taking a few of them to the speech drafting stages. But, I dunno, they were all quite complicated and didn’t give me the space I needed to speak about the academic side of my project. Doing standup, while I think I could do it if I practiced enough, is quite a leap for me. It was making me more nervous than was necessary for a project presentation :).

I ended up settling what I call the “Fun Youtube Science Communicator” vibe. You know, people like Lindsay Nicole, CGP Grey, MiniMinuteMan etc. All of the people who are amazingly nerdy and passionate, but goofy too. It’s a style i’m familiar with- as I often use it up at Scout Camp-, it’s easy for me to do, and I may get a few smiles which is all I need B).

The slide deck that I’m going with is all bright colours and fun lettering which will be of additional help in keeping people engaged. For a tas more pizazz, I used Procreate to create drawings to go with the slides. Enjoy some sneak peeks:

Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”

The reason for me chatting about this song are twofold: 1) There’s no way I could have talked about redrafting the same speech 5 million times for 500 words. I think you all might have genuinely died of boredom. And 2) this song is utterly PERFECT- it fits with the whole gist of my project impeccably. So enjoy my little rant about why I love this song so much.

If I had remembered this song before I submitted the final description for my SP, I so would have included it. “We didn’t start the fire” is a song commemorating the cycle of crap that humanity goes through.  It’s a song about pop culture, politics, and pain. Really, the agnostic’s version of the Holy Trinity. If you are unaware of the song (go listen!) it is a list of well known events, + & -, that rocked humanity from the mid 20th century to when Billy Joel published the song in 1989.

Britannica has a great article (find it here) that explains all of the 119 references in it. But before you read it, try and see how many you understand just with prior general knowledge. I got maybbeee 20 ish. Here’s a stanza (?) explained:

“Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev / Princess Grace, “Peyton Place” trouble in the Suez”

1. Bardot: Brigitte Bardot. Famous French adult film star.

2. Budapest: The center of many of the Hungarian revolutionary fighting against Soviet rule occurred here.

3. Khrushchev: The PM of the USSR. Known for his de-Stalinization policies [learn more about him in my Movie Review of “The Death of Stalin”]

4. Princess Grace: Grace Kelly. Famous American film star who married Prince Rainier of Monaco.

5. Peyton Place: One of the first successful soap operas on television.

6. Suez: The Suez Canal was nationalized by Egyptian President Gamal Nasser from the French/British enterprise that owned it prior.

What’s additionally cool is that Billy Joel gave Fall Out Boy (FOB) permission to produce & write a “sequel” to this song. It came out in 2023 under the same name (listen to it if you have not!). FOB used the same song structure (e.g. listing events) and melody, although they added a bit more electric guitar. I think it’s such a great piece of art to give a sequel too. Like, we really don’t need an additional live action remake of The Lion King, but of “We didn’t start the fire”? I’m all in. The song is such a great summary of important events of the last 30 odd years, and again reiterates the original point of the song: bad and/or crazy stuff will continue to happen as long as us humans exist and let it be.

The FOB sequel does have a slight difference, however. The original chorus goes:

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 tried to fight it… (Billy Joel, 1989)

whereas FOB’s goes:

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… (FOB, 2023)

 

Did you catch it?! FOB’s version says “But we’re trying to fight it” instead of “But we tried to fight it”. For a younger generation (yeah, I know FOB is not thattt young, but let me have this) that is often paradoxically lampooned for either being too cynical/apathetic or too naive/coddled, this lyric was an argument against that. It’s the incitement of genuine courage and optimism that the world needs if we ever are gonna have the chance to fix the problems that riddle this land. So props to FOB for writing that :). 

P.S.

Another song I wanted to mention, as it fits the satirical bill, is “Back in the USSR” by The Beatles. It’s a playful jab at Capitalist and Communist countries’ propaganda about why their economonic system is the best. It’s all made funnier by the fact that they used melodies reminiscent of The Beach Boys who are oh so bubbly and American.