Don't you remember?

One of those songs, #4.

Occasionally I do posts on old songs and where they fit in my life. The first one was about the Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll,” and then I did one about Glenn Yarbrough’s “Baby The Rain Must Fall,” and then one about The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” This time we’re going to skip ahead a few years from my childhood to my young adulthood, but maybe later we'll go back.

In 1985 I was playing guitar in shitty clubs and working temp jobs. I was young but not that young. I wanted only to do what I wanted to do, as defined by whatever was outside the enormous field of everything I didn’t want to do. I certainly didn’t want to play popular music. In retrospect I think I wanted to play an unpopular version of popular music and then make people like it. This was misguided and foolhardy but, I still think, noble.

I would go to clubs and hear bands I admired and in between sets DJs would play a mix of cool shit and the kind of popular songs I disavowed but that I’d dance to anyway because, as is so often the case in the sweaty dark, I didn’t pay close attention to principles. Besides, just because I didn’t want to play it didn’t mean I didn’t want to hear it.

I understood and envied the power of pop songs. I remember being bored out of my mind at some engagement party or something full of older people where it was nothing but cheese on the turntables when at one point the DJ put on Irene Cara’s “What a Feeling” and all the women in the room of every age, including yentas dressed like Alexis from Dynasty, removed their shoes and seized the dancefloor in a military encirclement maneuver and as soon as Cara went MADE OF STOOONE and the drums kicked in they went nuts, dancing like Broadway gypsies working out their kinks after a late show.

But there were some hits that just perplexed me. “We Built This City,” for example. Being a punk rocker I was leery of the Starship anyway. The Jefferson Airplane were hippies but at least they did songs about drugs and revolution. Now they were using DX7s and synth drums and Grace Slick wasn’t even singing half the time. Alberta Hunter was practically a hundred and she was still doing full sets at The Cookery, what was Grace’s problem?

Also — and this was the real puzzle — what were they talking about? From the video it looked like they were talking about the kids in the clubs, young people like me except with makeup and frosted tips and a clothing allowance. But not just us: Also giant dice and Abraham Lincoln. And something about money under the bar, wrecking balls, guitars? My summary judgment was all that rubbish was like the synthesized wood-flutes and the teased hair and the steel-cable bass sound: up-to-the-minute things piled on by stylists to make the old hippies au courant. Shoot, at least “Owner of a Lonely Heart” had some cool dynamic shifts.

Flash forward 35 years and it would seem my 1985 judgement has become received wisdom. Music critic types agree “We Built This City” is one of the worst, if not the worst, pop song in history. No one, it would seem, relates to it anymore as anything but an object of derision.

Except me.

Over the years I have grown fond of a lot of music I disliked in my youth. Some of it is a reaction to a reaction: I had turned away from James Taylor on misguided principle, and when I let that foolishness go I could enjoy him again. Lord knows I get more pleasure out of Judas Priest and Duran Duran now than I ever did back in the day.

But I still don’t really like “We Built The City.” I’ve just dropped my summary judgement; I remain puzzled by it, but in a different way — maybe fascinated is a better word. In fact, for who knows what reason I started singing the chorus to myself the other day, over and over. I also broke into individual lines at odd intervals (“Knee deep in the hoop-LA!”).

Remembering rather than listening, I couldn’t be distracted by the song’s ungainly sonic artifacts. I now saw the weird concatenation of images, not as totems thrown on to give some dumb band relevance to a vanished time and place, but as fossils left behind by the cataclysm in fashion that destroyed the song’s reputation and that no one living could properly interpret. (I mean the surviving band members can’t even agree on what the song meant now.)

Original lyricist Bernie Taupin claims he was alluding to the death of the L.A. club scene. I see that: The money counted underneath the bar, in those days, was always a short count for musicians. (Players today might not believe how little even big bands played for back then.) The corporation games, the stolen stage: all clear enough but, as is typical of Taupin, also fuzzy enough that the feelings the words bring don’t bite too hard or invite a sorrow that can’t be shaken off. This is hit-making, son, not romantic poetry.

But of all things the chorus, the damn stupid chorus, that the producer wrote, sweeping in on synth strings, still clings to me. For one thing, there’s nothing in cheap pop music like a sudden lift to a minor chord — and the chords behind that first line just so happen to be the same as the opening chords to The Flamin’ Groovies’ “Shake Some Action,” which, I think I stand on firm ground in asserting, is the sonic mystery password to about 12-15 years of great pub/punk rock. Taupin and everyone else says they don’t know what they meant by “Marconi does the mamba” and the rest of it, but of course they do, and so do we: Something about radio, then nonsense, the magic waves and the pleasing but vacuous sounds that make them profitable. But under that someone can also be heard pleading: maybe the Starship, trying to explain or apologize for what had happened to them since “White Rabbit”; maybe the kids from the video, frozen in time, trying to tell us that when they eventually became fat, stupid car dealers and cutthroat real estate agents it was not because they wanted to but because the monstrous lie that is our society conned them into it; maybe my own young self, reaching out to 2020 me like in an old pulp science fiction magazine story, gently cautioning me to never forget that even the things I thought I had wasted my time on, even the efforts I thought had come to nothing and were mocked by the ugly world we now live in, were not wasted at all, but their meaning, like the meaning of the song, remains mysterious because we haven’t figured it out yet, and we should keep trying ‘til we do. Don’t you remember? it says. We built this city. We built this city on rock and roll.