the problem with writing about bad songs is that it’s easy. it’s always more fun and more entertaining to write a whole 2000 words ripping apart a song you heard in 2010 that destroyed your eardrums. it’s significantly more difficult to sit down and talk about why, say, rush’s working man absolutely knocks your socks off. positive sentiment is, by nature of being positive, harder to grab ahold of. negative sentiments feel universal- we’ve all felt disgust in much the same way. positive ones are more slippery to communicate.
luckily, “we built this city” is a bad song, and i’m going to have fun writing about it.
this absolute shit of a song was written in 1985 by the band Starship, who were as far as I can tell the recollected members of jefferson starship post-petty lawsuits. someone got mad about the band name, they redacted the jefferson, they wrote a fucking horrible song. maybe they wrote some good ones! i don’t know. the name of the album “we built this city” is on is “knee deep in the hoopla”, which doesn’t bode well. i don’t know if i’ve heard of any other piece of music that involves the word hoopla, which is also a word that gets dropped in the lyrics of our focal song. we haven’t even gotten to the details and it’s already looking bad.
while much has been written about the history of we built this city, including interviews with the former members of starship, i’m not particularly interested in that. i want to point out things about the song (and music video for completeness’s sake) that make me want to dissolve my inner ear in acid. because the thing about we built this city is it isn’t a bad song by virtue of incompetence. the individual parts aren’t necessarily horrible- there’s 80s pop rock songs that sound worse than this- but when they come together in a chimera of sound the effect is such that this song routinely gets voted “worst song of all time”.
anyway, let’s get into the shit of it. the thick of it.
the song opens with a harmonized vocal, accompanied only by a drone on the keyboard. it’s just them singing the chorus of the song, which is appropriately stupid: “we built this city/we built this city on rock and roll.” it is the most enjoyable part of the song, which is saying something. i have no critiques other than this is the cheesiest shit imaginable, like UTTER cheese, but of course i’ve heard worse. it’s fine. it reminds me, weirdly, of bon jovi.
the video, meanwhile, opens with a weird off-coloured landscape. some birds fly across it. then our two vocalists from starship are chromakeyed in, and that’s when you realize what you’ve gotten into. it’d be a service to them to say that they just look like how people dressed in the 80s; i mean, they *do* look like that, but they also look like they popped into the studio completely unaware of what was going on, what they were supposed to do, and what looked “cool.” maybe they weren’t supposed to be cool! maybe that was the vibe they were trying to give off. it’s incomprehensible from the current standpoint.
once the chorus ends, the beat drops (as it were) and we’re treated to some of the goofiest sounding pseudo-slap bass i’ve ever heard. the video accompanies this with a fade in on the drummer’s hands (chromakeyed over the nondescript landscape, of course) and then a cut to the lead guitarist and the bassist playing their instruments. the bassist is wearing an unfortunate huge suit jacket that makes him look like he’s wearing a skirt suit due to his bass covering his waist. i really had to pause the video to check that he wasn’t- it was not a relief to find that it was just the suit jacket being shaped that way.
the instrumentation is bland, obviously completely synthesized, and really would suit itself better to some kind of sears commercial. it feels engineered in the same way a bridge is engineered. everyone in the video is trying to sell it so hard it hurts. the lead singer turns towards the camera and begins to snap his fingers to the beat, which gives him the distinct look of impersonating a mortal kombat character’s idle stance. he is wearing a short-sleeved button up shirt with the sleeves further rolled up, which i think is supposed to riff off of the marlon brando-style rolled up short sleeve tshirt. this is a mistake, because that only looks good on marlon brando, who this man is not.
the verse itself is so bland i can’t even remember the lyrics despite having watched/listened to the video several times directly before (and while) writing this. in the video, still shots of various early 20somethings are chromakeyed onto the background alongside our lead singer, who is still doing a mortal kombat idle animation. he drops the album title as the beginning of another verse, and my eyes roll so hard they detach from the optic nerve and drop, blissfully, to the floor.
pre-chorus time, and the line “Marconi plays the mamba” arrives, delivered with SO much seeming importance. i have no idea what this line means, and even though it may be a reference to something i’m too young to understand i am completely uninterested in finding out. i don’t know why they’re mentioning the mamba in a song ostensibly about rock and roll. i don’t know why they’ve written a pop song about rock and roll, either. they then instruct the listening audience to listen to the radio, which i can do. and then we’re back to the chorus-- we built this city on rock and roll. great!
the chorus, which is the only part of this song that anyone pays attention to, is not even that good. it’s not terribly catchy, but sticks in your head because of how annoying it is. what city? what city have you built? probably not this one, because this is not a rock song, and no rock song has ever had such delightfully cheesy midi brass playing every four bars as a fun little accent.
the video doesn’t help- through this part of the song, it’s a bunch of Cool 20somethings looking obliquely at the camera, and then a shot of the Lincoln Memorial, and then a shot of our singer, and then a shot of the Lincoln Memorial statue getting up and singing along to the song, and then it cuts back to the assembled Cool 20somethings, who are shocked to find that the statue is back to being just a statue.
What?
There is no part of this that makes any kind of sense, which is fine, because i’m pretty sure you would be immediately arrested upon possessing the amount of cocaine that went into this entire mess. it’s past the point of being campy (which was my original thesis); there is no wink wink nod nod to a portion of the audience. it’s just one long cocaine idea that had enough people backing it to become real.
the second verse starts in and takes the song to a weird semipolitical place- “Someone's always playing corporation games / Who cares, they're always changing corporation names.” this would be i guess a meaningful thing to say if it made any sense whatsoever. the rhyme is bad, the point of the line goes nowhere, it’s vaguely fingerpointy filler that is trying to help the song limp to the next chorus. i don’t know why they’d bring up corporations to begin with if the line also waves it off with a “who cares”. the rest of the verse doesn’t make sense either, gotta say. and the vocalist for this part is somehow worse. this may be bias stemming from the video, where she is chromakeyed on top of various Vegas neon signs and making direct eye contact with the camera. it’s unnerving at best, terrifying at worst, maybe because she’s got the 80s perm coupled with round-the-eye black eyeliner and a quite nice subtle peach lipgloss. she looks like she’s going to murder you, maybe.
it’s unclear why the setting has now changed to Vegas, and through the next chorus we’re treated to various shots of more neon signs, shots of our Cool 20somethings chromakeyed into the landscape, and then running from a giant die that falls off a sign. what city is this???
cut for guitar solo. it’s actually the coolest part in the song, because the repetitive groove we’ve been hearing the whole time thus far cuts and we get something that no joke approximates Tom Sawyer era Rush instrumentation. the guitarist in the video has the weakest stank face i’ve ever seen. he is chromakeyed, along with both singers, over a nondescript blue gradient background. his guitar solo lasts for approximately two bars until we’re back to the next verse. it is bad. i already want the song to be over; it feels like it’s overstayed its welcome and isn’t taking the hint to leave.
i think a lot of the problems with this part of the song is how breathlessly intense the singers are about delivering their lines. everything is sung with a percussive power to it that makes every word seem horrifically important. we move into the verse: they now attempt to engage with the audience on a political level. police are namedropped. we’ve apparently lost the beat. this makes no sense, which is kind of the opposite of what one would want in a political song. assuming that We Built This City is at all political. This verse doesn’t need to exist and doesn’t want to exist. it’s so stupid, so void of substance that the music video can’t even provide us with decent visuals to accompany this verse. all we get is our lead singer chromakeyed over a nondescript city skyline, shot in an uncomfortable closeup that only helps to emphasize how utterly useless the words coming out of his mouth are. near the end he’s joined by the other singer, who once again is downright frightening to behold as she overenunciates something about guitars.
at the end of this verse, the question i started out with gets answered. not my question about how this got made, but the question of what city. it’s san francisco. they show a picture of the golden gate bridge in the video, and play a little snippet of a radio station’s tagline mentioning san fran. what the fuck! i don’t think anyone in the fucking world outside of apparently the members of starship are going to think of san francisco and go “man, rock and roll sure built that city”. mostly they’ll think of, i don’t know, immigrants arriving during the gold rush and missions being founded in the area. the place is pretty old, relatively speaking, and it was a pretty important place well before the 40’s and 50’s began to birth the very first versions of rock. honestly, you could say the city was built on jazz and be a lot closer to the truth. mostly the city was built on… traditional working songs and hymns. that’s not as snappy, sure, but at least it gives me another reason to be incandescent in my hatred towards this song. i hate it so much. we have like two choruses left. ugh.
in the video, we get a pan during the prechorus over a group of people gazing rapt, slack-jawed, Up at something. the something is apparently starship, playing as an ensemble atop some scaffolding. they’re doing their best to look Cool. the drummer is pantomiming drumming on 50-gallon oil barrels. he has his hands wrapped in bandages, presumably for the cool factor, but he is pretending to drum deeply unconvincingly. the guitarist is giving a performance that would get lukewarm applause at a school talent show. the bass player is, well, playing bass. good for him?
this is supposed to be the final triumphant chorus, and it gets an extra dose of midi horns to really ram that idea through. it’s painful! the chorus is the best part of the song, and yet this is still deeply painful! the video is equally painful: the cool twentysomethings are now climbing up the scaffolding and onto the platform starship is performing on, then further up to some unknown peak. there are cuts to what i’m assuming are san franciscan buildings, bedecked in neon. one of them looks like times square circa 84, but having not been alive around then i have no idea if that’s the case. the camera then pans along a group of Cool Twentysomethings on the ground looking up to starship, all lipsynching as if their lives depend on it. well, some of them are trying. most of them look so delightfully bored that the whole effect comes off as “kids being made to perform a skit at school” rather than whatever they were going for.
We get a final limp guitar solo on top of the outro, and the song finally, blissfully fades to nothingness.
this song really is an ode to how empty a lot of the music being made in the 80s was; not empty in the like “oh they used keyboards for 99% of the instrumentation” sort of way my dad says it, but empty as in devoid of feeling and purpose. this song is a song made to make money in a way that most songs aren’t. it’s blatantly transparent about it. the lyrics are vague enough that it could be about pretty much any city at pretty much any time period where the youth are feeling creatively stifled. the instrumentation is *dull* more than anything else, painfully cheesy and repetitive. the video is i think more a function of the mtv sensibilities of the time, so i’ll give it a pass on the grounds that pretty much everything on mtv at the time looked similar to it in one way or another. the fake drumming on the oil barrels is pretty bad though.
i’m glad that i can hate this song, and i’m glad that i have a deserved target for much of my ire. that way when i’m having a bad day i can listen to the first thirty seconds of we built this city in order to purge my general malaise through the white hot heat of rage. as soon as i finished listening to this garbage heap of a song i went and queued up judas priest’s “breaking the law”, and i feel a lot better now.
i wrote this a few months ago. hope it’s good and didn’t go bad sitting in my google drive with nothing to do. <3