Song of the Day 5/25: Starship, “We Built This City”

There is a widely held misconception about this song. It is not the “worst song” of all time. It’s the most hated song of all time. It might sound like a semantic difference, but it’s not. The worst songs aren’t catchy ditties that go to No. 1 and are named “worst ever” 20 years after the fact. The worst songs are unlistenable. The most hated are still written and talked about 35 years later.

For context, Pete Sears, Starship’s bassist, said, “That was the best song on the album [“Knee Deep in the Hoopla”], even though it’s considered the worst song of all time. The rest were a load of crap.”

The problem with “We Built This City” isn’t that it’s a terrible song, it’s that it was assembled like a prefab house, with every part stamped “MTV hit.” If it had been performed by an unknown New Wave band — say, Q-Feel, whose leader, Martin Page, wrote the music — it wouldn’t have generated any hate at all. The demo Page recorded makes it sound like every other synth-driven New Wave tune of the time — it could be by Thomas Dolby.

It’s one thing when “Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names” is sung by Martin Page, unknown Brit. It’s a whole nother thing when it’s sung by a once-iconic band working under its just-adopted third name. It’s not the song, it’s that it’s being performed by that particular band, that makes it so hated.

Bernie Taupin, of Elton John fame, wrote the lyrics in 1984. “It was a very dark song about how club life in LA was being killed off and live acts had no place to go,” Taupin said. “It was a very specific thing.” The lyrics are obtuse, but so are many of Taupin’s other lyrics (did you pick up that “Daniel” was about a Vietnam vet fleeing attention in his hometown after his return?) One line in particular draws pointed criticism: “Marconi plays the mamba.” Marconi invented radio; the mamba is a snake. When co-lead singer Mickey Thomas asked Taupin what it meant, Taupin told him, “I have no fucking idea, mate.”

Taupin sent the lyrics to other musicians before Page — Martha Davis of the Motels says she turned him down — and the demo was sent to other bands before Starship, which included only Grace Slick from the original Jefferson Airplane.

The hyper-produced Starship version differs from the demo in a few subtle ways. It starts with a chorus added by Peter Wolf (the Austrian producer, not the J. Geils singer) that consists of just one line that repeats the title twice (hook repetition is key to producing hits, something Wolf was very successful at in the ’80s). The spoken-word radio bit that follows the line “Police have got the choke hold, oh, then we just lost the beat” was originally news about a riot — a natural follow-up to that line — rather than the civic-boosting DJ patter about San Francisco. That section of the song was often edited out by radio stations that inserted their own cities and DJs in its place.

The song was accompanied by a cheesy video — the Lincoln Memorial is sullied, and why are people running away from giant dice? — that nevertheless gave the song an important boost when MTV put it in heavy rotation (the fact that the DJ’s voice was provided by MTV exec Les Garland might have had something to do with that). Overexposure, a common theme among widely hated songs, was inevitable.

This all resulted in a catchy tune built on contradictions. As Starship guitarist Craig Chaquico pointed out in this oral history from GQ, “The song says we built this city on live music, let’s bring it back — but the music is computerized. It complains about techno pop, but it’s a techno-pop song. It exemplifies the problem it’s protesting.”

That the band doing this was Starship made it worse. As New York Times critic wrote when the record came out, “A compendium of strutting pop-rock clichés, ‘Knee Deep in the Hoopla’ represents the ’80s equivalent of almost everything the original Jefferson Airplane stood against — conformity, conservatism, and a slavish adherence to formula.”

The last was the main factor that led Blender in 2004 to place it atop (abottom?) its list of “50 Worst Songs Ever,” calling it “the truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar.” That article kicked off the hate-a-thon, even though, as Thomas noted, it was written with humorous intent. Many of the other songs on that list are far worse — “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Ice Ice Baby” and Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time” were all in the top 10, but “The Sound of Silence” was also named, apparently just to troll boomers.

You can’t find the original article online because, as “We Built This City” executive producer Dennis Lambert said a few years back, “I’m still here. Blender’s not.”