Why Do People Hate ‘We Built This City’?

by Kevin Burton

   I missed it, completely. It was totally over my head. I guess it’s just somebody’s else’s fight.

   “We Built This City” by Starship was number one on the US Hot 100 40 years ago this month. It’s catchy. I liked it then, still do.

   I loved the era when radio was king and I mourn radio’s demise. I like the spoken DJ part in this song. Takes me back to those days. It’s different and fun.

   And the idea of building a city on rock and roll gives the music heft, like bricks and mortar.

   “Knee deep in the hoopla” is both a lyric in the song and the title of the Starship Album it appears on. The song lyrics tweak corporations, and I like that too.

   Noy a bad song I say. But after the fact, long after it had fallen off the top 40, some people began to slam the song. I mean really slam it.

   “We Built This City” gets a bad rap. There, I said it. It’s not even Starship’s worst song. Nevertheless, it’s a standard on everybody’s Worst Songs of All Time lists,” reads a story on the website hooksandharmony.com.

   “We Built This City was perfectly content with being a number 1 Grammy-nominated song for about 20 years before it topped Blender magazine’s 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever, in 2004.

   “It grew from there. In 2011 a Rolling Stone poll of worst songs of the 80s had We Built This City at number 1 by a wide margin.”

   “GQ magazine declared it the worst song of all time, saying it was “the most detested song in human history.”

     Ouch. Really? Why do people hate “We Built This City?”

   “In 2004, Blender magazine named this the worst song of all time, saying it is ‘a real reflection of what practically killed rock music in the ’80s,’ and lamenting ‘the sheer dumbness of the lyrics, ‘ according to SongFacts.  “The article got a lot of attention when it was touted in USA Today.”
   “Much of this vitriol can be attributed to the transformation of the band, which delivered socially relevant protest songs in the ’60s and was a voice of the antiwar movement. By the time they were Starship, they were motivated by mass appeal rather than political action, and this song was an expression of that change,” SongFacts wrote.

   “The purists hated the musical direction the band was going. This was a band that was a mere shadow of their former 1960s hippie/psychedelic selves,” hooksandharmony wrote. “They remodeled themselves time and again, first in 1978 when founder Marty Balin left the group, to be replaced by Mickey Thomas. They developed an arena rock sound, with hits such as “Jane” and “Find Your Way Back” hitting the top 20.

    We Built This City got singled out as the representative of typical 80s lite rock that was beginning to make the 80s a joke, according to hooksandharmony.

   “New Wave was beginning to fade, and We Built this City was fodder for criticism along with other lite rock songs of that time” such as Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings,” Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On,” and Phil Collins’ “Sussudio.”

   “Listening to the song, it just isn’t that bad,” the website wrote.  

   We Built This City went through as many transformations at the Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship/Starship- band.

    “We Built This City came from an assemblage of top-tier songwriting and production talent,” SongFacts wrote, “Elton John’s songwriting partner Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics, which he gave to Martin Page (“In The House of Stone and Light”), who put music to the words and made a demo.

  “The song changed drastically from its original demo, which Martin Page composed using Bernie Taupin’s lyrics. The song was a cry of rebellion against a corporation trying to ban rock and roll in an imaginary future, but by the time Starship was done with it, it sounded more like a celebration of rock music in San Francisco, although a keen listen to the lyrics does reveal its distrust,” according to Songfacts.

   “Once the demo was made, Starship’s producers Dennis Lambert and Peter Wolf (not the J. Geils frontman) decided to record the song with the group on the condition that they make some changes. The most significant alterations were more repetitions of the chorus and the addition of the DJ/announcer who placed the song in San Francisco (“Looking out over that Golden Gate bridge…”), where the band formed in the ’60s as Jefferson Airplane,” SongFacts wrote.
   “As part of the agreement, Lambert and Wolf received composer credits on the song along with Taupin and Page. Even though they had to share their writers credits, both Taupin and Page have said that while the changes veered the song away from their original vision, Lambert and Wolf gave it tremendous popular appeal, and they appreciate the hit.

   “It will probably help send my children to college,” Taupin said. Page added, “It was very wise, because I know they wanted to have a hit. Our thing is a little bit more esoteric.”

   We Built This City was the first song released by the band under the name Starship. It was also the first top 10 hit for Taupin without Elton John.

   Lead singer Grace Slick is not a fan of this song. “We Built This City on rock and roll? There isn’t any city built on rock and roll,” Slick scoffed to Uncut magazine in 2020. “If you’re talking about LA, that’s built on oranges and oil and the movie industry. San Francisco, that’s built on gold and trade. New York that’s been around way longer than rock and roll.”
   “Bernie Taupin wrote the song about clubs closing in LA,” Slick said. “But clubs are not going to close forever in a city like LA. So it was a pretty stupid song.”