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?!?!)
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.
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!
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...
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!?!)
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.
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!
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...
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?"
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.
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.
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.
Beautifully written Roy. Thanks.
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.
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.