We Built This City

"We Built This City" by Starship is the much-maligned 1985 monument to corporate arena pop, routinely voted history's worst song yet impossible to dislodge from memory. Built on glossy synth stabs, a chugging mid-tempo groove, and a between-verses radio-DJ interlude, it's the sound of a former psychedelic band (Jefferson Airplane's distant descendant) fully surrendering to MTV-era sheen. Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas trade big, belted vocals, all reverb and conviction, selling lyrics that — beneath the bombast — actually lament the commercialization of rock and the corporate forces shuttering live-music venues. The irony, of course, is that the most cynically polished single imaginable is protesting cynicism. The chorus is pure stadium catnip, engineered for fists in the air and singalongs that override any critical judgment. Bernie Taupin, Elton John's lyricist, co-wrote it, which adds to its strange pedigree. Culturally it's become a punchline and a guilty pleasure in equal measure, the definitive artifact of mid-'80s excess. You'll hear it at sporting events, in supermarkets, soundtracking nostalgia montages. Listen with the irony switched off and it's genuinely rousing; switch it back on and it's a fascinating document of an art form eating itself with a smile.