Another person who hates it simply because it’s a fucking terrible stupid song. Airplane/Starship was always mediocre (IMO), but their psychedelic stuff was listenable. I can tolerate almost anything, including the teen pop they insist on playing at my gym, but WBTC makes me lunge for the mute button.
For the pledge drive edition of my radio show I had my first annual Crapfest–I played the worst songs I could dig up until I had raised my goal of $200. (“Macarthur Park” alone pulled in fifty bucks to make it stop.)
I downloaded “We Built This City” for the show, and it turned out not to be Starship’s version, but one of those sound-alike recordings they used to make with random studio musicians and sell on compilations. (Think K-Tel.)
A debate ensued as to whether this made it better or worse. A friend said that it was worse because it was a cheap copy of the shitty original. I suggested that it wasn’t as bad as the original, because it didn’t contain Grace Slick belting out the last of her dignity.
The one thing we all agreed on was that it was one of the worst songs of the eighties, which was not a decade bereft of horrid songs.
This song is just more evidence that Jim Morrison was right when he called Jefferson Airplane “The most boring band on earth.”
I liked it when I was 12. Unlike some of the other stuff I liked back then, it has not stayed in my like file. It’s just not a very good song.
I hated it and hate it now because it’s just a terrible song. It’s not catchy, it’s not fun, it’s awful. And I like rock and pop-rock and pop and all sorts of top-40 stuff from that era, but I hate this one. If I’d never heard of Jefferson Airplane or Jefferson Starship or Starship and new nothing about SF and the summer of love and selling out and Grace Slick, I would STILL hate that song. And I don’t mean mildly dislike, I mean hate. With a small h.
The band that sang “We build this city” has little to do with Jefferson Airplane.
The video was completely wrong. When I first heard this song, I imagined a nursing home full of old hippies throwing off the cobwebs and staging a rebellion against the repressive staff – kind of like a blend of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Cocoon,” and “The Crimson Permanent Assurance.”
The song’s dreck, to be sure, and if I were more fond of the Airplane, I’d probably be outraged instead of merely being contemptuous.
I hated this song when it came out, and for some reason they played the video on MTV over and over and over again. Musically and lyrically, it’s piss-poor.
Heh. Due to circumstances really not important now, it was a while before I found out who was it playing this track. And I disliked it from the start. It was like, Good God, man, was this thing written by the band’s manager on the back of a napkin? You call a track that rocks nothing “We built this city on Rock 'n Roll”?
When I found out who it actually was, it was like, “Huh… well, I guess it came time to pay up all that dope and booze. Can’t blame them but it still does suck.”
Wow, I guess because I was 12 at the time and grew up on top 40 music I didn’t see anything wrong with this song (still don’t) because it seemed to fit in with most of the other songs of that era.
I didn’t know until years later that Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship which finally became Starship. But even now I think the only songs I know from Jefferson Airplane are “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit”, and the only one I can think of from Jefferson Starship is “Miracles”. And while “We Built This City” is a big departure from those earlier songs, I honestly can’t say I see it as being worse.
And finally, as for the lyrics, I didn’t start paying attention to song lyrics until I was in my mid 20’s. A LOT of pop and rock songs have strange or nonsensical, or even stupid lyrics, especially in the 80’s. So while lyrics like “Marconi plays the mamba” makes me scratch my head and go, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” It doesn’t matter to much to me because there are tons of songs with lyrics that make me ask that.
I hate it because it’s horrible soulless corporate rock, obviously written (and performed) for the express purpose of getting radio/MTV play. Has nothing to do with their history (never liked 'em in any era), just the fact that it’s so unbelievably stupid it sounds like a parody of '80s top 40. As mindless as anything Journey or Foreigner ever did.
Just listen to the intro, the cheesy synths and the tacky drums, and you know it’s a bad bad song.
God help me, I like it (not that I’d want to hear it 24/7). I even have it on my iPod. Yes, it’s silly, soulless corporatized pop, but what the hell, it’s got a beat. It’s fun and brainless. Starship is so far from what Jefferson Airplane had been that it’s almost like it’s a completely different group, in a different era and with different musical goals. :: shrugs ::
I was just about to post that it’s not meaningful or deep, it’s just good mindless fun.
Didn’t Marconi have something to do with inventing radio, or patenting it?
For 20 years I thought that line was “My Tony plays the mamba.” I finally got it about a year ago. :smack:
I neither hate it nor love it. I like the pace it sets when it comes up on my iPod during my morning walk.
I also have “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” on the iPod. Even more cheesy and overproduced!
No, it’s torture. It’s about everything that went wrong with rock in the eighties. It’s got “rock” in it’s title, but it got nothing to do with rock at all, believe me.
Part of the hate comes from the fact it was specifically designed to be a hit.
For instance, where the DJ talks there is a version made that omits that part so that each radio station can fill in their own “DJ” bit with the name of their own radio station.
In otherwords it “smacks of effort”
Singles came into the big time in the 80s, especially with music videos. Prior to the early 80s it was a major and I mean big thing to pull three singles off an album and to pull three singles off an album and have them go into the top ten was very hard.
After about 1983 it became common place to have not only three but four or more hit singles from one album
So to have song specifically designed to be a hit, then craft it to be tailored to a particular radio station is marketing at its best.
I was a fan of the Airplane in the 60s, and when I heard “We Built This City,” my reaction was “meh.” It’s not a great song, but I don’t really see where the hate comes from. Hell, even the Airplane has done much worse – the “Blows Against the Empire” crap and everything.
But there are far worse songs.
Yes, but he wasn’t a performer. And a mamba is a snake – if they were referring to a type of music, then it should say “mambo”.
The best analogy I can come up with is, over the next 15 years, Coldplay changes its name to Coldwater, then to Water, then releases a song with the lyrics “Steve Jobs plays the hippo”.