What Fall Out Boy's "We Didn't Start the Fire" Can Remind You About Essay Organization

I recently heard Fall Out Boy’s version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”—Billy’s Joel’s rock anthem that chronicled 40 years of cultural and historical events from 1949 to 1989 (when Billy Joel released the original version).

Fall Out Boy’s three-and-a-half-minute version isn’t simply a cover of the Billy Joel classic but rather a completely new version with updated lyrics that covers newsworthy items beginning where Billy Joel's original left off and continuing through the first part of 2023.

But where the Billy Joel original was written in mainly chronological order, Fall Out Boy’s version is a bit all over the place.

The 1989 Billy Joel version opens with references to “Harry Truman” and “Doris Day” (1949), then goes on to list “Joseph Stalin” (1953), “Belgians in the Congo” (1960), “Watergate” (1972), and “rock and roller cola wars” (1989), with other chronological events appropriately squeezed in between the relevant years.

On the other hand, Fall Out Boy’s version of events is anything but chronological. The first verse alone is a mash-up of dates:

Captain Planet, Arab Spring, L.A. riots, Rodney King

Deep fakes, earthquakes, Iceland volcano

Oklahoma City bomb, Kurt Cobain, Pokémon

Tiger Woods, MySpace, Monsanto, GMOs

Specifically, here’s a list of the relevant dates of events in that first verse:

• Captain Planet ("Captain Planet and the Planeteers" was an animated television series that featured a quintet of teenage environmentalist superheroes. The show debuted in 1990.)

• Arab Spring (Arab Spring was a wave of pro-democracy protests and uprisings that took place in the Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2010 and continuing into 2011.)

• L.A. riots (The riots in Los Angeles took place in 1992 after the acquittal of the police officers who were charged with using excessive force in arresting Rodney King a year earlier.)

• Rodney King (As noted above, Rodney King was arrested in 1991, which begs the question: Why wasn't Rodney King identified before the L.A. riots in Fall Out Boy's lyrics?)

• Deep fakes (“Deep fake” emerged as a term in 2017 to describe realistic photo, audio, video, and other forgeries generated with artificial intelligence technologies.

• Earthquakes (I'm not sure what about "earthquakes" that Fall Out Boy is referencing, but it might be 2010. That's the year with the largest total of major earthquakes, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey.)

• Iceland volcano (While the Litli-Hrútur eruption took place just this year, the reference to "Iceland volcano" is probably to the volcanic events at Eyjafjallajökull that caused enormous disruption to air travel across western Europe in 2010.)

• Oklahoma City bomb (The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City took place in 1995.)

• Kurt Cobain (Kurt Cobain, the frontman of Nirvana, died in 1994.)

• Pokémon (Pokémon debuted in 1996 as an electronic game series on Nintendo's Game Boy system in Japan.)

• Tiger Woods (Tiger "Eldrick" Woods, perhaps the greatest golfer of all time, turned pro in 1996.)

• MySpace (This predecessor to Facebook launched in 2003.)

• Monsanto (In August 2018, a California court unanimously found that Monsanto had failed to warn of the carcinogenic dangers of its popular Roundup herbicide.)

• GMOs (In 1982, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first consumer "generically modified organism" product—human insulin to treat diabetes. But given the timeframe of the Fall Out Boy song, the relevant date here is probably 2015, when the FDA approved the first GMO in an animal for use as food—a genetically engineered salmon.)

The remaining events in the subsequent verses aren’t ordered any better, at least from a chronological standpoint. And that’s what makes the Fall Out Boy’s version hard to follow. (Even the cast of Avengers: Endgame covered its own chronologically Marvel-centric lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” starting with Ironman and ending with Thanos and Infinity War.)

I understand the songwriting and rhyming problems that Fall Out Boy probably faced by attempting to order the events chronologically by date, but I can only think that a more logical approach to order the events in the updated version of "We Didn't Start the Fire" would make new lyrics much more understandable and memorable, especially by those who weren't around in the 80s or 90s.

Okay, enough on my Rolling Stone soapbox. Let’s bring this back to law school and the bar exam.

As you’re organizing and structuring your law school and bar exam essays, make sure you use the most appropriate approach to organize and structure your response. In other words, don’t do what Fall Out Boy did in its version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and just link events together in a seemingly haphazard manner.

What are the best approaches to organize your issues in essay?

Before I begin, though, what I’m talking about here is specifically: How should you organize the issues you’re discussing? Of course, as you’re discussing those issues, you need to follow a consistent framework like CIRAC. But a discussion of CIRAC is beyond the scope of this post.

What I’m going to be talking about is how to organize those CIRAC discussions within your response.

Generally, there are three major ways to structure your response: (1) by party; (2) by claim; and (3) by date.

1. By Party

Organizing your response by party requires you to examine the actions of each party, one party at a time.

For example, take a Torts question, where Person A has sued Person B for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and Person B has brought a counterclaim against Person A for assault and has also asserted the affirmative defense of consent to the battery claim.

In this situation, you might want to organize your response in the following way:

I. Person A

A. Battery claim

B. NIED claim

II. Person B

A. Defense to battery claim

B. Assault claim

2. By Claim

Organizing your response by claim allows you to focus on one claim fully from beginning to end before addressing a different claim.

Using the same example as above, you might want to organize your response this way:

I. Battery claim

A. Person A’s prima facie case

B. Person B’s potential affirmative defense

II. NIED claim

A. Person A’s prima facie case

B. Person B’s potential affirmative defense (if any)

III. Assault claim

A. Person B’s prima facie case

B. Person A’s potential affirmative defense (if any)

3. By Date/Event

Organizing your response by date (or event) generally works better for essay questions where subsequent issues are mostly dependent on how your resolve earlier issues.

For example, in Wills questions, who gets what gifts generally depends on whether there is a valid will in the first place. In Contracts questions, examining potential remedies generally depends on whether there was a valid contract formed in the first place and, if so, whether that contract was breached. And, finally, in Secured Transactions questions, the question of which creditor has priority requires preliminary examinations of attachment and perfection.

Unfortunately, there's no one structure that will always work for every law school course or bar exam subject. But you should know the three different ways to structure a response and be flexible enough to know which one will work best in a particular situation.