Nope. Song still sucks. Trying to impute meaning to it is essentially an exercise in projection.
In fact, the entire Starship period should be wiped clean from both the airwaves and memory. Between Built This City and the rest of the excrement they pooped out, it was just an embarrassment for both the band and society as a whole. ("I had a taste of the real world, when I went down on you, girl." Really? Was this written by some 15-year-old with a traumatic brain injury from being hit upside the head with a dildo?!?!)
Nothing, really. It's just that the song is so--ambiguous isn't the word I'm looking for, but meaningless doesn't fit either--it's like the schmoo of rock--its is whatever you want it to be.
It seems to me that Jefferson Starship is a perfect example of how embarrassing Sixties worship is. I know I've said "Fuck man, such-and-such alt band I love has sold out" -- but nobody was holding that band's music up as an unmatchable paragon of popular musical achievement & social consciousness.
Lots of people love '60s' music because that was the music they heard during their musically formative years. Which can also be said for any music genre or period. My father loved him some Henry Mancini because that's what was popular when he was coming of age. It wasn't until he hit 60 and a friend introduced him to Sinatra and opera that his musical horizons expanded.
Oh I understand that & I totally respect that. That's not what I am talking about, though. I'm more interested in Rolling Stone idolatry that misidentifies the music of the boomer generation's cultural and musical awakening as the End of History.
I mean like every 18 months RS runs a cover story that goes like "Bob Dylan: Greatest Human Ever or Just the Greatest Musician?" He's great: we get it. Big world out there.
I'd say that "We Built This City" is a perfect exhibit for the argument that pop is nothing but empty banality. Which isn't correct. I mean, pop's easy to deride and dismiss and dis and "WBTC" perfectly shows it: Catchy beat, empty inane lyrics.
But you know who else hated the song (allegedly)? The band. They recorded it because Slick wanted a trashy, catchy hit because greed.
No, you want to blame someone, go with The German, Paul Kantner. Starship was his baby, from Blows Against The Empire to whenever he handed it over to Mickey Thomas. Gracie always said that band was a paycheck, nothing more, which tells me she was on salary. Though Starship became a shameless cash grab, I respect Kantner for pulling it off. You need a lot more than shamelessness to have a bunch of bit singles.
Yup, it’s garbage, but as you alluded to, it was written by those pro songwriters who have that alchemical talent to create an indelible hook that sticks in your head even if you hate the song. I do have respect for the people who can do it over and over again, factory style. Hooks are hard.
Reading this, I realized that there’s a through line from this song to We Didn’t Start The Fire (which is 4 years younger!) in that they are both middle-aged reckonings of where they’ve come from and gotten to (or as old Davey Byrne put it even earlier, “how did I get here?”). They deal with the topic as each would according to their personalities: Grace and team are self-satisfied, triumphal ex-hippies letting a Fairlight and a hired songwriter do the heavy musical lifting for them, BJ is pissed off and defensive and worried that he’s no longer relevant and ripping someone else’s idea off (I’ve always found it hilarious how New Wave scared the shit of him in the early 80s so he just adopted as many trappings of it as he could).
I think Kantner was still in the band at this point too! Wonder what he was thinking!
My college roommate was a Billy Joel fanatic, I even went to a concert of his in a stadium with her, and I grew to really hate him back then. Now I like him because he reminds me of college, but back in the day I used to retaliate by playing my huge collection of Donovan records, especially the "first there is a mountain" song which she could not stand.
There's a book to be written about who various rock stars admire and/or take as inspiration. I recall seeing Ray Davies of The Kinks talking about how he was blown away by ABBA and how they influenced his subsequent work.
I was just talking about that awful Dschingis Khan band from Germany in the 70's. Prefab garbage, but seriously amusing. Turns out their producer later would bring us Milli Vanilli. An ear for what people will buy...
There’s nothing like those weird 80s music videos! I always liked this tune, not in a “it’s on my top 10 desert island disks” way, but it’s annoyingly catchy and I can’t help sing along anytime I happen to run across it. It’s popularity probably wasn’t hurt by the radio bit, which every station across the country replaced with one of its own, personalizing the song for each “city.” Everyone needs some dumb pop fun now and then. Speaking of, for some reason now I feel the need to go dig up Patty Smyth’s The Warrior...
My favorite "what the hell were they thinking" video from the 80s is Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra" but they were all so cheesy. They are great to watch now. I particularly love the Eurhythmics.
I kinda liked Abracadabra, but then I was 12. Regardless, I make no apologies. The Eurythmics and Annie Lennox remain awesome. I still like the pop-surreal video for Sweet Dreams and the Wuthering Heights vibe of Here Comes the Rain Again.
True story: my dad, recently divorced and ready to meet women again, decides to start liking rock (he was & is a lifelong Classical music master). His first purchases: on LP (natch) Jethro Tull's Broadsword and the Beast, The Yes Album, and the Steve Miller Band's Abracadabra. Those were basically the first rock albums I ever heard all the way thru. I hope they found him success...
It's a shame, because when it comes to actual music, Billy Squier had some fat hooks and was pretty good! The song old man Edroso is going on about....Jeesh.
It is shocking how bad the "Rock Me Tonight" video is. At least "The Warrior" had the advantage, in its day, of including a singer who Early Teen Me thought was about the prettiest girl possible -- with cool face paint! -- so I watched it always in a kind of rapture. ...aaand having just now rewatched it, yikes (though she is still cute and still has a sexy voice). What was the mid-80s-pop/rock fascination with duking it out in a post-apocalypse ruin? Anyway turns out (quick rabbit hole I went down) "The Warrior" was written by Holly Knight, whose band Device I liked (because I thought she was hot and cool) -- so I just rewatched their video "Hanging on a Heart Attack," and that song, I'm happy to discover, holds up well as a slice of the 80s, even if the video also goes in on the ruins vibe too, this time in a ruined hospital. The visuals were more compelling though, and felt like a very rough draft of Pink's "Just Like a Pill," which is genuinely a good video (though by the time Pink hit, I was too old to develop those innocent, enraptured, slightly afraid kind of crushes on singers; I do remember recognizing that she would have made the cut if I was still 13-16). tl;dr, here's a list of girls/songs I liked.
"Rock Me Tonight" was pretty lousy, but I love, looking back, how thoroughly "straight innocence" is an actual thing. So many dudebros looked at that video and refused to see what happening there.
And that Device song is pretty good.
That first Tori Amos album (Why Kant Tori Read?) has that post-apocalyptic thing going too. The eighties sucked for a lot of people...
"What was the mid-80s-pop/rock fascination with duking it out in a post-apocalypse ruin?"
By the time the '80s rolled around, we'd been living with the threat of nuclear destruction for almost 30 years. Everyone was pretty traumatized by that, but at least we had presidents who worked hard to avoid such a thing happening.
And then came Ronald Reagan. Sweet Saint Ronnie, cracking jokes into live microphones about having ordered nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union; making speeches about how Russia was the Evil Empire that needed to be destroyed; teaming up with evangelicals who were eager for the End of the World.
So the post-apocalyptic scenes in '80s music videos were very much a reflection of that.
Sigh. That's way more true than not. Videos did ruin rock. There have been a few I've liked (Black Hole Sun had a sinister, Lynchian mood that was compelling to me at the time)... but if you ever write that piece, I won't fight you. (Write it!)
The Warrior! Heh heh. Before Patty Smyth and Scandal hit, the band did this TV ad for Frank’s, a local Philly soda. Another one I hated at the time, but now seems like a goofy B+ Jingle. If you’re curious: https://youtu.be/VEJJumUq5hI
I stopped following contemporary music somewhere around 1980, so although I was always dimly aware that this song existed, I had never really listened to it, and hadn't seen the video at all. So after reading this piece (beautiful stuff, I love this series), I watched the video.
It's appalling. I mean really appalling. The only part of it that's in any way watchable is near the end where you see the band actually playing, with the city in the background. It's a generic, inoffensive scene, with a plastic feel that unfortunately doesn't seem ironic. But at least you're not embarrassed to be watching it. The rest is empty pretentiousness, and that's being kind.
Then I listened to the song without the video. At best it seems just another version of "we're outsiders and we've been screwed over by this awful society but we'll keep carrying the flame blah blah." At worst--and I'm guessing this it's why it's been so reviled--it's the same thing, except written and performed by posers. I don't have any skin in that game, so for me it's just one big meh.
Mind you, the hook on "we built this city" is slightly catchy, maybe 4 on a scale of 10.
In 1980 I was doing escort duty for Kennedy surrogates in Iowa. I forget which two daughters Ethel Kennedy had with her, but we were all at a greasy spoon in Prairie du Chien across the Mississippi River from Senator John Culver's converted hotel/family vacation home (that the Iowa Attorney General had just tried to break into but someone had moved the spare key so we we were having hamburgers instead).
I fed the jukebox and when the brand new Journey song I'd punched in came up, I asked the sisters what they thought of Journey. The eye rolls they exchanged told me everything I needed to know. I immediately punked out and never looked back. Which was not hard to do after Ted got his brains beaten out by Jimmy "my god could it have been more obvious Reagan would beat him?" Carter.
Now that I think about it, I dived heavily into "noise" right after my guy dropped out and gave Amy Klobuchar the US Senate nomination in 2006. After this November, I'm thinking I'll have to go black metal assuming something louder doesn't come along.
The way you've described this awful awful song makes me wonder why the GOP hasn't glommed onto it as campaign theme song: It makes similar vacuous and erroneous claims to have built something that the Pubs have on Fox. It drips in faux-outsider pretension. Its vaguely apopaloptic video suits recent campaign visuals. And I'm sure Bennie Taupin could be convinced to let it go.
It was the '80s. There was a *whole lot* of synth-driven suck back then.
A theory: Bernie Taupin, or someone, listened to Huey Lewis and the News, and either went to or was approached by Grace Slick--"Why don't we try it this way?"
Everyone seems to think Grace was the mastermind, but she was just a hired gun in Starship.
I was at a songwriter workshop that had Bernie Taupin as a guest, he also claims to be embarrassed by the song. And he has no idea what Marconi plays the mambo means. Bernie's working method is to write lyrics and hand them off to a composer. The producer is the guy responsible for that thick layer of 80's cheese on the song, though it's extremely well crafted cheese. Notice how the melody lays perfectly over the rhythm of phrases like Marconi plays the mambo, or We built this city.
Oh I am such an outlier musically. I am neither proud of it nor ashamed; it's just the way it happened. (Okay, maybe I'm still a little baffled.) In junior high school and high school, I played in the school orchestra, so it was show tunes and classical music from, roughly, 1964-69. My parents despised most popular music except for Sousa marches and easy-listening faux classical-lite stuff by "101 Strings". I didn't get out much.
Blah blah blah, it was weird. But in my new high school orchestra, I'd made friends with Lisa Silver, a vivacious, talented, violin-playing dynamo who sometimes let me tag along with her to shul. One Friday she apologized: she had to back out of Friday evening services because - she was so excited! - she'd scored tickets to see the Jefferson Airplane. I said, no problem, have fun, and then I wondered to myself, what is a Jefferson Airplane? Is it like an exhibit of some kind?
So that was 1968 or so. Then came an intense, unavoidable submersion into rock & roll chaos (there was a war on) that finally spit me out in the mid-70s. I retreated to baroque until BAM, the Talking Heads covered up the blank spots and hit me on the head.
So "We Built This City..." never really got carved into my musical psyche. Whatevs. I am happy to report that Lisa Silver ended up in Nashville, successfully deploying her fiddle and vocal skills in country music *and* as a cantor in a local synagogue. I miss her. She was fun.
My husband will wax poetic on the way the Talking Heads affected him. He remembers hearing "to the river" for the first time on a car radio and being blown. away.
One of my main issues about music snobbery is that *everyone* proudly says they always hated this song and it was terrible. It was a #1 hit when it came out, and it was on high rotation on the radio for ever (and it's still played quite frequently on the old pop stations with men's names that seem to exist in every metro area). *Someone* must have liked it. No one admits to it now - cowards!
I think it's very catchy. And I LOVED this essay because I am just about ten years younger than you, Roy, I suspect, and this music was my teenage years. I can just imagine going to see you playing in your band because I am a music gourmand - I like big band, bluegrass, classic rock, and 80s power ballads. I love them all.
Of course as one gets older one must represent by disliking the music of the latter days. I don't like modern pop songs very much, I recognize that they're catchy, but they don't have enough going on and one of my pet peeves is that bands like "Monsters and Men" sing everything in unison which is REALLY boring.
I once did an entire morning of music on my radio with a show I called "The Best of the Bad." It was all those No. 1 singles that everyone later said sucked. Songs like "Patches" or "Honey" (by Bobby Darin).
There is a ton of really atrocious pop music. But as Duke Ellington said, if you like listening to it, it's good music.
Okay. I know you may find this hard to believe, but I have absolutely no recollection of your title song. (And yes, I watched the music video.) On the other hand, I remember going downtown to see Alberta Hunter on more than one occasion. "Handy Man!!!" Now that was a song! Oh -- before I forget. Did you see that Annie Ross died? She's the one who wrote that fab song "My Analyst Told Me", which, until I read Annie's NY Times obit, I thought Joni Mitchell wrote. Great obit, BTW.
You went to those shows? I couldn't afford to because I spent all my entertainment budget on horrible noise! I regret it now of course. I did try to get a job as a busboy there. I actually interrupted Barney Josephson's lunch to pitch for it, which shows how dumb I was.
Hey, some of us never got within a thousand miles of Alberta Hunter, and had not heard of her until today. Well, I guess I did blow through New York in the summer of 1979 on my way to a science workshop at West Point, but as I was 17 and naive, there was no chance of getting to the music
Great story! Yeah, I saw Alberta at least twice. It was my San-Francisco-based brother Who introduced me to her music — Also Mose Allison’s. I had “Your Mind is on Vacation and Your Mouth is Workin Overtime” as my answering machine message for years!
I had such fun watching a YouTube video of Annie singing Twisted with Count Basie on the piano. It looks like everyone’s in a swanky suburban living room. Check it out!
This is a great piece, as always, Roy. Except for the fact that I hate that song and while I've abandoned a lot of my judge baggage when it comes to music, it still irks me that people like it ironically (or sincerely, it doesn't matter), but I can't account for taste! However, it offends me less than the Journey thing that people started loving 15 years ago for reasons I still can't fathom to the point where it became Tony Soprano's outro and part of the pop canon. Still, I musically came of age when the Starship hit it with this, and they were so incredibly removed from my understanding of rock and roll, it retroactively made me not listen to Airplane who actually had some good songs. Luckily, for me, The Damned covered White Rabbit, so I got in the backdoor and wondered how on Earth they could share some common lineage.
I understood why, later in life, when all of my perfectly curated tastes and finely honed sense of musical authenticity in various genres and micro-genres began to feel less and less important to me. By the time Cobain killed himself, I didn't remember why I thought, for about a week, he sold out in the first place. Who cares? By that time, I knew it was hard enough to make a living in this world, never mind as an 'artist', so I started cutting slack where no slack had been given. I started finding the groove in all kinds of shit, PINK FLOYD EVEN, which I used to hate, on principle, because of someone else's principle. Or because it was fun to stand in opposition of my stoner friends' rote cliches of AOR musical choices.
Now I'm a far more catholic sort. Still don't like excesses -- Yes is a war crime -- but I've found honest music extends even to house, which I had long mocked as bleeps and blorps. So I guess the joke's on me.
I think it's great to get freed up and expansive and learn to love the whole of earth's creation and still think some songs suck. Feels more earned in a way.
Pop music of the 80’s passed by without my knowledge. That decade was a blur and not because of what you think, kids. Work, work, work, up all night, I wonder now how I did it. The Stones were in a musical funk, ZZ Top went disco, why turn on the radio? I was far from the South and mountain music but at least I could go down to Chicago’s South Side and hear the blues before those guys all died. It wasn’t until we were in Buenos Aires in 2017 that I heard most 80’s pop music on this local station, in the mall, in a cab - those Porteños love American 80’s rock as much as they love fútbol, and they love fútbol a lot.
"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"
We all want to believe that. There may even be some truth in it; I don't know.
Nope. Song still sucks. Trying to impute meaning to it is essentially an exercise in projection.
In fact, the entire Starship period should be wiped clean from both the airwaves and memory. Between Built This City and the rest of the excrement they pooped out, it was just an embarrassment for both the band and society as a whole. ("I had a taste of the real world, when I went down on you, girl." Really? Was this written by some 15-year-old with a traumatic brain injury from being hit upside the head with a dildo?!?!)
What’s wrong with projection on a cheap radio song?
Projection is what makes pop (music or otherwise) fun.
I've read my life into many a hit!
Nothing, really. It's just that the song is so--ambiguous isn't the word I'm looking for, but meaningless doesn't fit either--it's like the schmoo of rock--its is whatever you want it to be.
Anodyne -- and not anodyne like the Uncle Tupelo recording
Oy.
It seems to me that Jefferson Starship is a perfect example of how embarrassing Sixties worship is. I know I've said "Fuck man, such-and-such alt band I love has sold out" -- but nobody was holding that band's music up as an unmatchable paragon of popular musical achievement & social consciousness.
Lots of people love '60s' music because that was the music they heard during their musically formative years. Which can also be said for any music genre or period. My father loved him some Henry Mancini because that's what was popular when he was coming of age. It wasn't until he hit 60 and a friend introduced him to Sinatra and opera that his musical horizons expanded.
Oh I understand that & I totally respect that. That's not what I am talking about, though. I'm more interested in Rolling Stone idolatry that misidentifies the music of the boomer generation's cultural and musical awakening as the End of History.
I mean like every 18 months RS runs a cover story that goes like "Bob Dylan: Greatest Human Ever or Just the Greatest Musician?" He's great: we get it. Big world out there.
Yeah, that too.
Somebody to Love is pretty great. The Ramones thought so! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6-qT6dLMz0
Weren’t they still in the Bay Area then? Maybe it was a warning of what was to be lost. (Gilbert Shelton moved to *France*, FFS.)
I'd say that "We Built This City" is a perfect exhibit for the argument that pop is nothing but empty banality. Which isn't correct. I mean, pop's easy to deride and dismiss and dis and "WBTC" perfectly shows it: Catchy beat, empty inane lyrics.
But you know who else hated the song (allegedly)? The band. They recorded it because Slick wanted a trashy, catchy hit because greed.
I’m sure the band cashed those royalty checks, though ( assuming they got any).
Song made big bucks, just like Slick wanted.
No, you want to blame someone, go with The German, Paul Kantner. Starship was his baby, from Blows Against The Empire to whenever he handed it over to Mickey Thomas. Gracie always said that band was a paycheck, nothing more, which tells me she was on salary. Though Starship became a shameless cash grab, I respect Kantner for pulling it off. You need a lot more than shamelessness to have a bunch of bit singles.
“Go with the German” LOL
Yup, it’s garbage, but as you alluded to, it was written by those pro songwriters who have that alchemical talent to create an indelible hook that sticks in your head even if you hate the song. I do have respect for the people who can do it over and over again, factory style. Hooks are hard.
Reading this, I realized that there’s a through line from this song to We Didn’t Start The Fire (which is 4 years younger!) in that they are both middle-aged reckonings of where they’ve come from and gotten to (or as old Davey Byrne put it even earlier, “how did I get here?”). They deal with the topic as each would according to their personalities: Grace and team are self-satisfied, triumphal ex-hippies letting a Fairlight and a hired songwriter do the heavy musical lifting for them, BJ is pissed off and defensive and worried that he’s no longer relevant and ripping someone else’s idea off (I’ve always found it hilarious how New Wave scared the shit of him in the early 80s so he just adopted as many trappings of it as he could).
I think Kantner was still in the band at this point too! Wonder what he was thinking!
My college roommate was a Billy Joel fanatic, I even went to a concert of his in a stadium with her, and I grew to really hate him back then. Now I like him because he reminds me of college, but back in the day I used to retaliate by playing my huge collection of Donovan records, especially the "first there is a mountain" song which she could not stand.
In one of his autobiographical stories Bukowski says he prefers Donovan to Bob Dylan because he has "real style." I can see it!
Donovan over Dylan any day
There's a book to be written about who various rock stars admire and/or take as inspiration. I recall seeing Ray Davies of The Kinks talking about how he was blown away by ABBA and how they influenced his subsequent work.
I was just talking about that awful Dschingis Khan band from Germany in the 70's. Prefab garbage, but seriously amusing. Turns out their producer later would bring us Milli Vanilli. An ear for what people will buy...
There’s nothing like those weird 80s music videos! I always liked this tune, not in a “it’s on my top 10 desert island disks” way, but it’s annoyingly catchy and I can’t help sing along anytime I happen to run across it. It’s popularity probably wasn’t hurt by the radio bit, which every station across the country replaced with one of its own, personalizing the song for each “city.” Everyone needs some dumb pop fun now and then. Speaking of, for some reason now I feel the need to go dig up Patty Smyth’s The Warrior...
Ah, The Warrior! It’s either her or Billy Squier that were the first to have their careers destroyed by a bad video.
My favorite "what the hell were they thinking" video from the 80s is Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra" but they were all so cheesy. They are great to watch now. I particularly love the Eurhythmics.
The whole era in a nutshell: https://images.app.goo.gl/jVsqqQECmYLi5pKm6
I kinda liked Abracadabra, but then I was 12. Regardless, I make no apologies. The Eurythmics and Annie Lennox remain awesome. I still like the pop-surreal video for Sweet Dreams and the Wuthering Heights vibe of Here Comes the Rain Again.
Hey, at least there was a “magician” in that video, lol.
And thank you for the memory of a boyfriend at the time, claiming that song as “ours”😳😐😑
You should tell Grace that sometime!
True story: my dad, recently divorced and ready to meet women again, decides to start liking rock (he was & is a lifelong Classical music master). His first purchases: on LP (natch) Jethro Tull's Broadsword and the Beast, The Yes Album, and the Steve Miller Band's Abracadabra. Those were basically the first rock albums I ever heard all the way thru. I hope they found him success...
It's a shame, because when it comes to actual music, Billy Squier had some fat hooks and was pretty good! The song old man Edroso is going on about....Jeesh.
Billy Squier's "The Big Beat" was a staple break for hip hop DJs for decades
He’s the most sampled Rock star, and has made a lotta money from it!
It is shocking how bad the "Rock Me Tonight" video is. At least "The Warrior" had the advantage, in its day, of including a singer who Early Teen Me thought was about the prettiest girl possible -- with cool face paint! -- so I watched it always in a kind of rapture. ...aaand having just now rewatched it, yikes (though she is still cute and still has a sexy voice). What was the mid-80s-pop/rock fascination with duking it out in a post-apocalypse ruin? Anyway turns out (quick rabbit hole I went down) "The Warrior" was written by Holly Knight, whose band Device I liked (because I thought she was hot and cool) -- so I just rewatched their video "Hanging on a Heart Attack," and that song, I'm happy to discover, holds up well as a slice of the 80s, even if the video also goes in on the ruins vibe too, this time in a ruined hospital. The visuals were more compelling though, and felt like a very rough draft of Pink's "Just Like a Pill," which is genuinely a good video (though by the time Pink hit, I was too old to develop those innocent, enraptured, slightly afraid kind of crushes on singers; I do remember recognizing that she would have made the cut if I was still 13-16). tl;dr, here's a list of girls/songs I liked.
"Rock Me Tonight" was pretty lousy, but I love, looking back, how thoroughly "straight innocence" is an actual thing. So many dudebros looked at that video and refused to see what happening there.
And that Device song is pretty good.
That first Tori Amos album (Why Kant Tori Read?) has that post-apocalyptic thing going too. The eighties sucked for a lot of people...
THE SHIRT RIP!
Billy doesn’t care about looking silly, he made a TON of dough from being the most sampled White Rock Star.🤩
That genuinely amazes me.
His song “Big Beat” has been sampled a zillion times, as well as “The Stroke” and others- but those are the biggest.
"What was the mid-80s-pop/rock fascination with duking it out in a post-apocalypse ruin?"
By the time the '80s rolled around, we'd been living with the threat of nuclear destruction for almost 30 years. Everyone was pretty traumatized by that, but at least we had presidents who worked hard to avoid such a thing happening.
And then came Ronald Reagan. Sweet Saint Ronnie, cracking jokes into live microphones about having ordered nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union; making speeches about how Russia was the Evil Empire that needed to be destroyed; teaming up with evangelicals who were eager for the End of the World.
So the post-apocalyptic scenes in '80s music videos were very much a reflection of that.
Not sure what a "genuinely good video" is. One day I have to write about how there really isn't any such thing.
Sigh. That's way more true than not. Videos did ruin rock. There have been a few I've liked (Black Hole Sun had a sinister, Lynchian mood that was compelling to me at the time)... but if you ever write that piece, I won't fight you. (Write it!)
Wasn't Patty Smyth going out with or married to Richard Hell at some point? I'm afraid to look it up. Lie to me if you have to!
Yup, married once upon a time. No more though, now she’s married to John McEnroe (yeah, THAT John McEnroe!)
Eventually married. No recollection how that worked out.
She’s been married to McEnroe for decades.
Made for each other!
Yeah, "The Warrior" is pretty painful. She had a good voice tho.
The Warrior! Heh heh. Before Patty Smyth and Scandal hit, the band did this TV ad for Frank’s, a local Philly soda. Another one I hated at the time, but now seems like a goofy B+ Jingle. If you’re curious: https://youtu.be/VEJJumUq5hI
Omg that’s fantastic!
I stopped following contemporary music somewhere around 1980, so although I was always dimly aware that this song existed, I had never really listened to it, and hadn't seen the video at all. So after reading this piece (beautiful stuff, I love this series), I watched the video.
It's appalling. I mean really appalling. The only part of it that's in any way watchable is near the end where you see the band actually playing, with the city in the background. It's a generic, inoffensive scene, with a plastic feel that unfortunately doesn't seem ironic. But at least you're not embarrassed to be watching it. The rest is empty pretentiousness, and that's being kind.
Then I listened to the song without the video. At best it seems just another version of "we're outsiders and we've been screwed over by this awful society but we'll keep carrying the flame blah blah." At worst--and I'm guessing this it's why it's been so reviled--it's the same thing, except written and performed by posers. I don't have any skin in that game, so for me it's just one big meh.
Mind you, the hook on "we built this city" is slightly catchy, maybe 4 on a scale of 10.
In 1980 I was doing escort duty for Kennedy surrogates in Iowa. I forget which two daughters Ethel Kennedy had with her, but we were all at a greasy spoon in Prairie du Chien across the Mississippi River from Senator John Culver's converted hotel/family vacation home (that the Iowa Attorney General had just tried to break into but someone had moved the spare key so we we were having hamburgers instead).
I fed the jukebox and when the brand new Journey song I'd punched in came up, I asked the sisters what they thought of Journey. The eye rolls they exchanged told me everything I needed to know. I immediately punked out and never looked back. Which was not hard to do after Ted got his brains beaten out by Jimmy "my god could it have been more obvious Reagan would beat him?" Carter.
Now that I think about it, I dived heavily into "noise" right after my guy dropped out and gave Amy Klobuchar the US Senate nomination in 2006. After this November, I'm thinking I'll have to go black metal assuming something louder doesn't come along.
The way you've described this awful awful song makes me wonder why the GOP hasn't glommed onto it as campaign theme song: It makes similar vacuous and erroneous claims to have built something that the Pubs have on Fox. It drips in faux-outsider pretension. Its vaguely apopaloptic video suits recent campaign visuals. And I'm sure Bennie Taupin could be convinced to let it go.
It was the '80s. There was a *whole lot* of synth-driven suck back then.
A theory: Bernie Taupin, or someone, listened to Huey Lewis and the News, and either went to or was approached by Grace Slick--"Why don't we try it this way?"
Everyone seems to think Grace was the mastermind, but she was just a hired gun in Starship.
I was at a songwriter workshop that had Bernie Taupin as a guest, he also claims to be embarrassed by the song. And he has no idea what Marconi plays the mambo means. Bernie's working method is to write lyrics and hand them off to a composer. The producer is the guy responsible for that thick layer of 80's cheese on the song, though it's extremely well crafted cheese. Notice how the melody lays perfectly over the rhythm of phrases like Marconi plays the mambo, or We built this city.
Oh I am such an outlier musically. I am neither proud of it nor ashamed; it's just the way it happened. (Okay, maybe I'm still a little baffled.) In junior high school and high school, I played in the school orchestra, so it was show tunes and classical music from, roughly, 1964-69. My parents despised most popular music except for Sousa marches and easy-listening faux classical-lite stuff by "101 Strings". I didn't get out much.
Blah blah blah, it was weird. But in my new high school orchestra, I'd made friends with Lisa Silver, a vivacious, talented, violin-playing dynamo who sometimes let me tag along with her to shul. One Friday she apologized: she had to back out of Friday evening services because - she was so excited! - she'd scored tickets to see the Jefferson Airplane. I said, no problem, have fun, and then I wondered to myself, what is a Jefferson Airplane? Is it like an exhibit of some kind?
So that was 1968 or so. Then came an intense, unavoidable submersion into rock & roll chaos (there was a war on) that finally spit me out in the mid-70s. I retreated to baroque until BAM, the Talking Heads covered up the blank spots and hit me on the head.
So "We Built This City..." never really got carved into my musical psyche. Whatevs. I am happy to report that Lisa Silver ended up in Nashville, successfully deploying her fiddle and vocal skills in country music *and* as a cantor in a local synagogue. I miss her. She was fun.
My husband will wax poetic on the way the Talking Heads affected him. He remembers hearing "to the river" for the first time on a car radio and being blown. away.
That was a great cover...did he ever hear the original?
One of my main issues about music snobbery is that *everyone* proudly says they always hated this song and it was terrible. It was a #1 hit when it came out, and it was on high rotation on the radio for ever (and it's still played quite frequently on the old pop stations with men's names that seem to exist in every metro area). *Someone* must have liked it. No one admits to it now - cowards!
I think it's very catchy. And I LOVED this essay because I am just about ten years younger than you, Roy, I suspect, and this music was my teenage years. I can just imagine going to see you playing in your band because I am a music gourmand - I like big band, bluegrass, classic rock, and 80s power ballads. I love them all.
Of course as one gets older one must represent by disliking the music of the latter days. I don't like modern pop songs very much, I recognize that they're catchy, but they don't have enough going on and one of my pet peeves is that bands like "Monsters and Men" sing everything in unison which is REALLY boring.
Thanks, Anna. Stay safe out there!
I once did an entire morning of music on my radio with a show I called "The Best of the Bad." It was all those No. 1 singles that everyone later said sucked. Songs like "Patches" or "Honey" (by Bobby Darin).
There is a ton of really atrocious pop music. But as Duke Ellington said, if you like listening to it, it's good music.
Okay. I know you may find this hard to believe, but I have absolutely no recollection of your title song. (And yes, I watched the music video.) On the other hand, I remember going downtown to see Alberta Hunter on more than one occasion. "Handy Man!!!" Now that was a song! Oh -- before I forget. Did you see that Annie Ross died? She's the one who wrote that fab song "My Analyst Told Me", which, until I read Annie's NY Times obit, I thought Joni Mitchell wrote. Great obit, BTW.
You went to those shows? I couldn't afford to because I spent all my entertainment budget on horrible noise! I regret it now of course. I did try to get a job as a busboy there. I actually interrupted Barney Josephson's lunch to pitch for it, which shows how dumb I was.
Hey, some of us never got within a thousand miles of Alberta Hunter, and had not heard of her until today. Well, I guess I did blow through New York in the summer of 1979 on my way to a science workshop at West Point, but as I was 17 and naive, there was no chance of getting to the music
Great story! Yeah, I saw Alberta at least twice. It was my San-Francisco-based brother Who introduced me to her music — Also Mose Allison’s. I had “Your Mind is on Vacation and Your Mouth is Workin Overtime” as my answering machine message for years!
And yes, I heard about Miss Ross. Always happy to hear Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and Twisted is a beautiful lyric. She made it to 90, bless her!
I had such fun watching a YouTube video of Annie singing Twisted with Count Basie on the piano. It looks like everyone’s in a swanky suburban living room. Check it out!
Beautifully written Roy. Thanks.
I rarely reply to my own posts but for music how about this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0W7K8tYK-Y
This is a great piece, as always, Roy. Except for the fact that I hate that song and while I've abandoned a lot of my judge baggage when it comes to music, it still irks me that people like it ironically (or sincerely, it doesn't matter), but I can't account for taste! However, it offends me less than the Journey thing that people started loving 15 years ago for reasons I still can't fathom to the point where it became Tony Soprano's outro and part of the pop canon. Still, I musically came of age when the Starship hit it with this, and they were so incredibly removed from my understanding of rock and roll, it retroactively made me not listen to Airplane who actually had some good songs. Luckily, for me, The Damned covered White Rabbit, so I got in the backdoor and wondered how on Earth they could share some common lineage.
I understood why, later in life, when all of my perfectly curated tastes and finely honed sense of musical authenticity in various genres and micro-genres began to feel less and less important to me. By the time Cobain killed himself, I didn't remember why I thought, for about a week, he sold out in the first place. Who cares? By that time, I knew it was hard enough to make a living in this world, never mind as an 'artist', so I started cutting slack where no slack had been given. I started finding the groove in all kinds of shit, PINK FLOYD EVEN, which I used to hate, on principle, because of someone else's principle. Or because it was fun to stand in opposition of my stoner friends' rote cliches of AOR musical choices.
Now I'm a far more catholic sort. Still don't like excesses -- Yes is a war crime -- but I've found honest music extends even to house, which I had long mocked as bleeps and blorps. So I guess the joke's on me.
I think it's great to get freed up and expansive and learn to love the whole of earth's creation and still think some songs suck. Feels more earned in a way.
HOLD ON TO THAT FEEE-EL-ING!
Pop music of the 80’s passed by without my knowledge. That decade was a blur and not because of what you think, kids. Work, work, work, up all night, I wonder now how I did it. The Stones were in a musical funk, ZZ Top went disco, why turn on the radio? I was far from the South and mountain music but at least I could go down to Chicago’s South Side and hear the blues before those guys all died. It wasn’t until we were in Buenos Aires in 2017 that I heard most 80’s pop music on this local station, in the mall, in a cab - those Porteños love American 80’s rock as much as they love fútbol, and they love fútbol a lot.
"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"
We all want to believe that. There may even be some truth in it; I don't know.
I think so!