40 years ago this week, Starship’s debut single bagged the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 when “We Built This City” usurped Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice Theme,” because it was 1985 and popular TV show theme songs were chart-topping shoo-ins. The other day I was sorting the 45 RPM discs in my baby-blue Go Case and found a copy of “We Built This City” tucked in there. Of course, I dropped a needle on it and did a little head bob. It’s a fun song to tidy up a room to, and it’s an even better song to drive through a town with. At one point “We Built This City” was, according to co-writer Bernie Taupin, “a very dark song about how club life in L.A. was being killed off and live acts had no place to go.” What it turned into was a bit brighter, hopeful. A city built on rock ‘n’ roll? That sounds pretty damn good, don’t ya think?
In June 1984, Paul Kantner—the last remaining founding member of Jefferson Airplane—walked away from Jefferson Starship when they wanted to “go modern,” suing his old bandmates over the name he left behind on his way out. By the following March they all reached a settlement, agreeing to drop the “Jefferson.” Getting into the muck of the whole Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship/Starship name fiasco would take thousands of words, so I’ll spare you the mostly uninteresting rock ‘n’ roll backstory. The renaming birthed Starship: Mickey Thomas, the guy who sang lead on Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell In Love”; Grace Slick, the psychedelic maverick whose pipes scored the time-altered, wild excitements of “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”; and the trio of Craig Chaquico, Pete Sears, and Donny Baldwin.
The band was a sorta-fine pop vestige of a sorta-fine acid outfit from the San Francisco Sound’s heyday. Jefferson Airplane are, to me, the least compelling of the “Summer Of Love” ilk. Their work, especially the undoubtedly influential Surrealistic Pillow, pales greatly when it lands in conversations with titles like Forever Changes, Electric Ladyland, and Cheap Thrills. What’s funnier is that Jefferson Starship doesn’t even register for me. Seriously, what a nothing-burger of a rock band! Sure, Red Octopus went platinum in 1975 and topped the Billboard 200, but every non-“Miracles” song is just an apathetic, tepid attempt at prog-rock. Here’s my advice: Go listen to literally any other prog-rock band from the era. But hey, I’m no real authority on the matter. I’m just a rock critic that likes the gaudy sellout junk Starship made in the ’80s, which is probably grounds for my critic card getting revoked, depending on who you ask.
“Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” is usually my go-to song of Starship’s (and, genuinely, one of the best power ballads ever, IMO), but “We Built This City” floors me for being so terribly of its time. It’s the most-dated of all the dated ’80s songs, actually, but each second, even Slick’s painfully annoying enunciation of “corporation games,” is worth taking a splash in. When “We Built This City” came out in August 1985, it was praised—as much as a dance-rock song during mainstream music’s deluge of dance-rock songs could possibly get from the music rags, when #1 hits still carried a shred of importance. Billboard called it an “unusual rock ‘n’ roll anthem […] as wise as it is rebellious.” The Grammys liked it well enough too, nominating it for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group in 1986, an award given to Dire Straits for “Money for Nothing” instead. Trophy or no trophy, I’m a sucker for any song that sounds like the musical equivalent of a blazer jacket with its sleeves rolled up.
But the 40 following years tell a different story: the now-defunct Blender magazine kicked off the dissent in 2004 when it named “We Built This City” the worst song ever, writing: “It purports to be anti-commercial but reeks of ‘80s corporate-rock commercialism. It’s a real reflection of what practically killed rock music in the ‘80s.” Grace Slick spent the twilight of her career preserving her legacy with a mea culpa, disavowing the single completely after supposedly wanting to “tour, make a lot of money, and then retire” upon Starship recording Knee Deep in the Hoopla at the Record Plant in Sausalito. Rolling Stone polled its online readers in 2011 and not only named the song the worst of the ‘80s, but revealed that it was “the biggest blow-out victory in the history of the Rolling Stone Readers Poll.” Really, thousands of people agreed on this song being the worst? You really shouldn’t pair mathematics with rock ‘n’ roll, but, as of this writing, “We Built This City” has been streamed over 682 million times on Spotify. That’s a whole lot of hate-listens. Blaming rock ‘n’ roll’s greater absence on the pop charts from the 1990s until now on “We Built This City”? Every cultural crime needs a scapegoat, I suppose.
Maybe my view of the mainstream world is different because I’ve witnessed so much soulless, cookie-cutter pop slop hold court at #1. I’ve suffered through “Happy” and “See You Again” and all of those songs from the Trolls soundtracks. One of the categorically worst songs I’ve ever lent an ear to, “Old Town Road,” spent 19 weeks at the top in 2019. In 40 years its pageant of annoyance may wow me. Maybe my parents feel that way about popular songs like “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” “The Final Countdown,” and “Kokomo.” They were all inescapable and exhausting once; now, when they come on in the car, Mom and Dad sing along to them like they’re brand spanking new. But like all music that’s catchy and overplayed and evocative of the culture it spawned from, “We Built This City”’s detractors arrived later on—long after the single exited the charts, when Starship’s post-Grace Slick chapter hardly warranted them “legacy act” status.
Before she died, my grandmother always told me that “bell bottoms were gonna come back,” but nobody is going to wear a Starship resurgence anytime soon—nor should they, because “We Built This City” is terribly dated. I mean, make no mistake: It could have only come out when it did, and even the modern artists pawing at ‘80s sounds aren’t clamoring to replicate such a high-handed, bogus techno style. And what “We Built This City” was 40 years ago was the consequence of aging rock stars about to collide with irrelevancy—which makes its use in John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign all the more bleak. No rock band with an ounce of dignity was going to record this song in 1985, even if you included a million-dollar check with the demo. Maybe that sort of desperation is what makes the damn thing work in the first place. But still, “We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage. They call us irresponsible, write us off the page” is a touching take on the music business outgrowing you.
Heart faced the same issue two years later and generated “Alone,” a power ballad viewed as a much more sincere artistic response to the intrusive, obsolescent doldrums of pop music. The rock magazines painted “We Built This City” as not only this polished, too-radio-friendly betrayal, but as a conformist, formulaic pile of steaming, traitorous dogshit. The lyrics were anti-commercial but hypocritically delivered in commercialist platitudes by hippies-turned-yuppies, even though “Marconi plays the mamba” is a properly moronic line for a hit pop song. Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick singing about the enduring power of live music in their hometown? Good. Doing it on a track so computerized and robotic? Bad. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just naive, but I don’t think a folky protest song about the death of anti-corporate rock ‘n’ roll was going to break through in the land of cocaine and synthesizers, sorry. Craig Chaquico playing an acoustic guitar while Thomas utters the phrase “knee-deep in the hoopla”? Now, that would have been a sight.
I call a lot of music “perfect,” because I love music so damn much, but “We Built This City” has always eluded my own personal pantheon and always will—like I said: “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” exists. It’ll never be a “greatest song of all time” candidate, let alone a “greatest song of 1985” candidate. But I listened to the record again and had a great time doing so. In fact, I don’t think I’ve skipped “We Built This City” once, and I look forward to passing its big and bright and catchy and ridiculous headaches onto the next generation. No, I’m not trying to rehabilitate the song’s image. I just feel no embarrassment about loving it this much. So while I’m alive, those sometimes-charming lyrics and that passé, overexposed playing style, which most music snobs would probably prefer to nuke completely from the history books, will persist miraculously and annoyingly. The folks who made “We Built This City” got shit-rich from it and lived long enough to agree with the rest of the world that it “sucks.” Even if you believe Starship’s concessions to be true, there are far worse outcomes for a band of any kind, especially theirs. I (incorrectly) quote the great Pete Weber: “Hate it or love it, you listened.”
(This article was originally published in Paste on 11/17/2025.)
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
