Get updates delivered to you daily. Free and customizable.
American Songwriter
The ’80s Starship Hit Grace Slick Called the “Worst Song Ever”
By Tina Benitez-Eves,
30 days ago
Jefferson Airplane came into the mid-’60s with hits “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” before transitioning to Jefferson Starship by the’ ’70s. In the 1980s, the band had three hits within two years under its third iteration Starship. By the end of the decade, Grace Slick grew weary of Starship’s music and left the band in 1988, then briefly rejoining the newly reformed Jefferson Airplane, before retiring in 1990.
At the time, Slick was at the height of her career again, since the Jefferson Airplane days, when Starship released three No. 1 hits within two years, including “Sara” in 1985, and the Diane Warren and Albert Hammond-penned “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from 1988. Released on Starship’s 1985 debut, Knee Deep in the Hoopla, which peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard 200, “We Built This City,” written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Wolf, was the band’s third big hit, topping the Hot 100.
While Slick sang on the track with Starship vocalist Mickey Thomas, it remained a song she long despised.
“I was such an a–hole for a while, I was trying to make up for it by being sober, which I was all during the ’80s, which is a bizarre decade to be sober in,” revealed Slick in a 2012 interview. “So I was trying to make it up to the band by being a good girl. Here, we’re going to sing this song, ‘We Built This City on Rock and Roll.’ Oh, you’re shitting me. That’s the worst song ever.”
[RELATED: Grace Slick Timeline: The Woman Who Wrote “White Rabbit,” Became the Acid Queen and an Accomplished Painter]
A City Built on Rock and Roll
Though the lyrics are somewhat ambiguous and can interpreted in several ways, at the core it tells the story of a city built on rock and roll, the early days of radio, and the presumable changes and hindrances within the music industry—Someone’s always playing corporation games / Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names / We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage.
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
Built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
Say you don’t know me or recognize my face
Say you don’t care who goes to that kind of place
Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight
Too many runaways eating up the night
The lyrics also reference the inventor of the radio, the Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, but it’s not clear why he’s linked to a mamba, a venomous snake of the sub-Saharan rainforests. There are also no direct links between Marconi and mambo music, which originated decades later in Cuba by the late 1930s.
[RELATED: Starship’s Final Hit with Grace Slick “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”]
Marconi plays the mamba, listen to the radio, don’t you remember?
We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll
We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll
Built this city, we built this city on rock and roll
Someone’s always playing corporation games
Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names
We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage
They call us irresponsible, write us off the page
Grace Slick on ‘Solid Gold’ before her Starship days, 1982. (Photo: MediaPunch/Shutterstock)
Towards the end of “We Built This City” is a call out to keep rock alive.
It’s just another Sunday in a tired old street
Police have got the choke hold, oh, then we just lost the beat
Who counts the money underneath the bar?
Who rides the wrecking ball into our guitars?
Don’t tell us you need us ’cause we’re the ship of fools
Looking for America, coming through your schools
Whatever the meaning within its verses, Slick never bought into it.
“We built this city on rock and roll?” questioned Slick. “There isn’t any city built on rock and roll. If you’re talking about LA [Los Angeles], 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.”
Slick continued, “Bernie Taupin wrote the songs about clubs closing in LA. But clubs are not going to close forever in a city like LA. So it was a pretty stupid song. And anyway, everybody thought we were bragging about San Francisco, which we weren’t. We had three songs that went to number one in the ’80s. I didn’t believe the lyrics of any of them.”
Get updates delivered to you daily. Free and customizable.
It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency:
Our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. As a platform hosting over 100,000 pieces of content published daily, we cannot pre-vet content, but we strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation.
Comments / 0