Rock in the 80’s got very commercialized, and I guess I can see how that could make people unhappy. In fact, it did get revolted against in the 90’s. But to say it’s not rock. I mean, it doesn’t rock as much as hard rock and heavy metal songs, and it’s on the lighter end of the spectrum, but it’s rock.
OK, I have no clue why, but those lyrics always had me picturing Marconi shaking a pair of maracas.
My thoughts exactly. I saw them live in 1986 or 1987 at an amusement park. It was accidental. Horrible, horrible song. Being “catchy” isn’t much of a redeeming value for me if everything else about the song is so damn cheesy and pretentious.
And for my money, almost ANY song not written in the 1950’s, 1960’s or 1970’s (Led Zeppelin gets a pass) should never, ever, EVER use the phrase “Rock” or “Rock and Roll” in ANY of their songs. It’s way too played out.
I was wondering if someone was going to mention the whole “custom DJ middle” thing. I didn’t know about that at first because my local Rock station resisted making one for a number of months. When they finally did, it made me want to smash my radio out of my dashboard!
Rock and Pop have a quintessential love/hate thing. Pop music is essentially watered down & gussied-up Rock music. Or rather, watered down ‘whatever type of music is popular at the time’, and in the 80s it was Rock. There’s not usually anything particularly wrong with a real Rock band having big success by straying into the Pop genre a little. Or even sometimes a lot. But what made WBTC such an abomination was:
[ul]
[li]It was a 100% pure, over-the-top, mindless, sugar-coated, teenybopper song (akin to something like The Archies Sugar-Sugar or Paul McCartney’s Coming Up)[/li][li]Considering the above, lyrically it tried to present itself as some kind of modern ‘take to the streets and rebel’ anthem[/li][li]Starship was the direct descendant of a 60s & 70s legitimate Rock band[/li][li]It wound up in heavy, heavy, HEAVY rotation on both Top 40 & AOR radio, and (especially) MTV[/li][/ul]
When The Grateful Dead had there biggest (& only) hit with A Touch of Grey nobody freaked out because, even though it was essentially a Pop song, it still maintained enough of their folksy, bluesy style to not be considered a ‘sell-out’. This also made it a pretty decent song, artistically (unlike WBTC).
One great memory I have associated with We Built This City however, is a really great joke Letterman made about it in his monologue back on his old NBC show at the height of the song’s popularity.
He starts saying something like, “Even if you could build a city on Rock n Roll, even if you tried to build a city on Rock n Roll, even if it were theoretically possible to attempt the building of such a city…” He continues on and on with this over and over for maybe two minutes, until finally getting to the punchline:
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"You’d still have to use Mob concrete!"
I was seven at the time and lived and breathed the Top 40, so I don’t think that’s it.
I don’t know, slamming a pop record because the lyrics are rubbish is a bit like saying that the Sahara is not your favourite desert because it is too arid.
Somebody mentioned “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”, which demonstrates to me that WBTC is not even Starship’s worst song. There were dozens, hundreds even of hit songs in the 80s worse than WBTC. Where’s the hate for (to name some random examples that popped into my head) “Borderline” by Madonna, or “I Just Called to Say I Love You”, or the entire catalogue of Michael Bolton?
I like the song, but I was in kindergarten when it came out and I didn’t connect “Starship” with “Jefferson Starship” or “Jefferson Aeroplane” until I was in High School, and even then I thought of them as people who wrote music to shoot up Vietnamese Fishing Villages in slow motion to.
This thread is the first I’ve heard of the song being almost universally disliked, incidentally.
This is off the subject, but I bought tons of K-Tel compilations in the 70’s. They were all fully-licensed recordings from the original artists, not sound-alikes.
Back on topic, I do like We Built This City, although I relize it is not universally liked.
Actually, I think the answer is the Internet. Someone did a list of worst rock songs of all time and put “We Built This City” as number one. And everyone piled on. The list was copied and soon everyone thought it was a terrible song (a similar thing happened to Ishtar, though pre-Internet – everyone “knew” it was a terrible movie and either never watched it, or watched it merely to complain about it).
Basically, there were certainly some people who didn’t care for the song, and when it was listed as the worst of all time, they followed the herd.
It’s not a good song, but it’s pretty innocuous. Save the hate for Michael Bolton.
Because it makes me want to stick BB guns in both of my ears and shoot out my ear drums?
I’m listening to the song right now, and it’s pretty bad. In fact, I’m a little boggled that anybody sincerely (as opposed to ironically) enjoys this song.
Holy crap, and I thought Missy Elliot’s “Work It” was the first one to do that.
Color me informed.
Your mind is boggled that musical taste is subjective?
I was surprised when I heard (on an SDMB thread) that Huey Lewis & The News’ s “Heart of Rock 'n Roll” had Huey sing different cities for different markets.
Because she sang something to the effect of “Everybody’s playing corporation games/Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names”
(a) like it was such a totally rebellious thing to say
and
(b) oh, for f**k’s sake…
That’s it really.
For a while there in the late 70s and early 80s, videos were new and fun and cool, and most of the acts making them were hip groups bubbling up from the underground. (Not acts that corporate masters had DEEMED were going to be the next big thing.)
Then in the mid 80s it became apparent that the corporations had figured out this video thing and they were going to use videos to sell us dreck and impose musical tastes from the top down. This song and video were symptomatic of that, and became a sort of marker of the end of the golden age of videos.
At least for me.
(All of which makes the line in the song about “corporation games” really ironic.)
cockroaches - Why the hate?
dentistry without anesthesia - Why the hate?
The Illinois Nazis - Why the hate?
The creators of this song had a dream. Their dream was to make a collection of tones, that would produce the emotion of pure hatred. Why? Who the hell knows? Maybe they were upset that it was the freaking ‘80s and the hippy era was not just dead but being bought and sold like a commodity. Maybe they hoped the shallow, crass commercialism of the song would make people realize what a horrible idea it is to have basically 4 radio stations in the whole country. Maybe they had a deal with Satan. Maybe they just got up on the wrong side of the bed but for whatever reason, they wanted a song that would make people feel hate. Not just a little hate. Not annoyance. Not peeved. Not ticked. But HATE. The hatred you feel for a child killer, a terrorist, or the person in line in front of you who orders the last tr-colored bomb pop when they know damn well there is only one and that you wanted it and they don’t even really like tri-colored bomb pops they just wanted to be a dick. They wanted the listeners’ bodies to tremble with hate.
And they succeeded.
If you don’t have this reaction, the creators of the song hate you.
I call “Kneedeep In The Hoopla” the “We’re holding Grace Slick’s entire family hostage to force her to do this album” album.
It’s just sad. If you listen to her on 60s stuff like “White Rabbit” or “Somebody To Love”, and then listen to her on “We Built This City”, it’s obvious that she checked out after the first rehearsal. She’s just not into it at that point, so we don’t actually get Grace Slick, we get Grace Slick’s vocal cords singing independently of her conscious effort.
I can’t say I blame her. If half the stories I hear are true, Mickey Thomas was an ass and a half, not just to her, but to everybody.
Note that when playing “Settlers of Catan” it is inevatable that someone will sing “We built this city with wheat and ore”
brian
Another HATE IT here. And good gawd they played the hell out of it. That song ran 2X per hour for 8 months.
Pat Benetar’s ‘We Are Young’ is another one that is utter pop crap.
The 80’s had lots of songs that were designed to be hits. When the “artist” and the record label stooges sat at a conference table and hashed out some schlock.
Lyrics = “What does our highest purchasing demograph want to hear?”
Music = “What is cool and edgy but inoffensive and 4 min 19 seconds?”
“What can we put to video”
Forget about the artist being inspired about anything but the bottom line.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except for the relentless, and I mean RELENTLESS airplay.