For some reason, this mention of Starship's "We Built This City" led me down a hole of Internet research on my own personal Mandala Effect rabbit hole. I remembered as a kid, the Residents - who I only knew at the time as a bunch of guys wearing eyeballs as their heads - being part of the video for "We Built This City". I later became a fan of the Residents, who hadn't mentioned this at all. No evidence of them appearing with Starship, including the video for "We Built this City". But I hadn't been able to shake this vision for decades. Did I imagine it?
Tonight, digging deeper, I found it! I found the source. In 1984, just a year before "We Built this City", Jefferson Starship (the progenitor of Starship, we won't mention the Airplane here) released a video for their ostensible hit single "Layin' it on the Line".
There they were! The Residents! In a terrible, terrible Jefferson Starship video! Sung by Grace Slick and, uh, that dude from Starship!
Strangely, I'll be able to sleep deeply tonight knowing that this mystery that was knawing at my soul for so many years has finally been solved.
I feel like I should be familiar with this song but I'm not, and I have to say, truly one of the great choruses of 80's rock: "we're layin' it on the line (layin' it on the line) ---just layin' it all, right on the line".
No, it's named for Nelson Mandela. Because when he died people falsely thought they remembered him dying a couple of decades before. But they likely conflated his release from prison with his death.
I remember having my own rabbit hole with the Residents band.
In junior high I used to stay up late and watch Letterman. He used to have Chris Elliot the comedian on doing various bits. He had one that imitated the Residents where Chris and several other people dressed up in weird outfits called something like "Maumoshcantz" or something French sounding. Chris' costume had a big black box with three toilet rolls for the face on it and played bizarre, "avant-garde" music. When they finished, Chris came over to sit with Dave. Dave tried to announce the name of the band and Chris scolded him by over pronouncing the name. Then Dave asked what part Chris played and he exclaimed, "I played the guy with toilet rolls on his head Dave! Shesssh!"
I recounted the bit to a friend and he instantly said the whole bit was a tilt of the cap to the band The Residents and it poked fun at their outfits and members on purpose.
This lead me, pre-internet to start digging around to find out what I could about the band. A few weeks later there was some MTV News story about a musician who died that apparently was one of the members. They made light of the fact nobody knew this since the band had purposefully concealed their identities so they could rotate out people as necessary and then say they just wanted people to focus on the music instead. Strangely enough, there was a similar story making the rounds on the internet about something similar that Slipknot was doing and Corey Taylor even used the same reason they wear masks - so fans can focus more in the music! This of course, brought back memories in my own research that eventually concluded with an older brother of a friend who was into really weird stuff and gave me a somewhat sordid history of the The Residents, and some the eerie connections to their management team Cryptic Corporation. He even pulled out several albums saying there's a possibility The Beatles WERE the Residents and showed me the two albums "Meet the Residents" and "Meet the Beatles" album as proof. Keep in mind, I was like 10, my buddies brother was like 16; so imagine how that conversation went down.
Anyways, thanks for bringing this up, it was really fun remembering my own rabbit hole with that band. Which interestingly enough, started with a David Letterman bit and ended with similar rumors swirling around Slipknot.
The Letterman bit must have been parodying Mummenschanz, an avant-garde Swiss theater group that was pretty popular (as those things go) at the time. They do feel a bit in the same corner of the arts universe as the Residents...
The idea of a worst song of all time is silly, but I want to use this as an excuse to juxtapose We Built this City with another Starship hit: Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now. The latter is just as fluffy and corny, but instead of generic corporate rock it's a soaring silly power ballad duet.
I think the secret sauce is Diane Warren. It's the same reason I love belting out I Don't Want to Miss a Thing at karaoke, or listening to If I Could Turn Back Time on a loop while working.
This post has been sponsored by the Committee to Get Diane Warren into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (CGDWRRHF).
The idea that "We Built This City" is somehow worse than all the garbage pop music hits that have come out in the past 20 years is absurd. Sure, "We Built This City" is pretty cheesy, and certainly not the best example of 80s rock, but at least it's listenable, unlike the overly-compressed and Autotuned crap that modern pop is.
I agree that a "worst song of all time" is a bit silly, but if someone was trying to make the worst song of all time that would still get regular radio play and you asked me for ideas, "put a traffic report in the middle of the song" would be pretty high on my ideas list.
I say that with love as I absolutely love the We Built This City (and Starship for that matter)
I know your description includes "still get regular radio play", but one of my favourite pieces of troll music is "The Most Unwanted Song". They surveyed people to find the things they liked least in music and put it all together. I don't want to spoil just how creatively awful it is or what's in there, so I'll just drop the link and go.
I mean...c'mon..they could have at least picked a "worst song of all time" that wasn't a Billboard Top 100 #1 hit. Ditto for "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"...
The same one that hates Nickelback (they're not great, but terrible?, nah), clowns ("eek, let's collectively decide to feign fear at the humorously funny looking people with big shoes at the circus, even without having read "It"!"), and "moist" (who wants an arid cupcake?).
One of my coworkers stated this a few years ago: "i'm on an interesting musical journey right now: trying to identify musicians/groups/bands/artists, etc. that i've over looked because they were "mainstream" popular"
And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.
I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
Haha these internet fads are great. Especially when you hang out with people who aren’t chronically online.
There was also the bit about gauges and hipsters (which just became the most mainstream). Then there was the fedora hate which I think was the funniest because I knew about it (because I’m chronically online) and then one day I’m traveling through Japan with my friends and the girls are all like “you should try out these hats at this store” and it’s piece for piece exactly what Reddit would hate. But the girls loved it on the lads and I’m married to one now.
It’s like how here people are always like “oh I’d never give X a buck they’re stealing all your data” and then out in the real world people love Google, like adore it. What’s the deal with that?
I remember REM self-nominating 'Shiny Happy People ' as the worst song. And even though it was one of their most successful songs in the charts they refused to play it live.
Denis Leary: I want you to pull this bus over on the side of the Pretentiousness Turnpike! I want the shiny people over here, and the happy people over here.
I had forgotten just how much I hated that inescapable song in the 80s. Definitely close to my worst song ever. There's plenty of 80s pop that I've softened my views on as I got older and even started to grudgingly appreciate, but not "we built this city".
I don't think I'd even recognize a single Taylor Swift song. I plan to keep it that way, currently she's just a name and a face to me, knowing her music would probably only cause me to dislike her unfairly.
Eh. Swift isn't my cup of tea; you're much more likely to find me at an industrial metal show. However, she's crazy talented, and her music is well-produced and wildly catchy. She's really good at what she does.
Along those lines, I'd never pay to see Britney Spears perform, but "Toxic" goes hard.
Their music shouldn't make you dislike them. It's not objectively awful, not by a long shot. If anything, just acknowledge we're not the target audience and move on.
I too try to avoid falling into the all-too-typical trope of reflexively hating on what's broadly popular just because it's popular. While I'm also not a big fan of Swift's music, I agree it's consistently very well executed. I also think she deserves genuine respect for remaining both artistically and financially successful for well over a decade without imploding like so many pop stars seem to. I suspect this requires both intelligence and strength of character.
Yeah I know. Because I just don't like pop music, and having understood she's got a reputation as really talented, actually hearing her music only risks downgrading my impression of her. I'm fine with being out of touch/irrelevant.
My kids (and their friends too) don't listen to current music either, so I don't get much exposure to it.
I think you're missing the point. WBtC is a "bad" song in exactly the same way that Swift's songs are "bad". It's unashamedly pop, aimed at tastes that sophisticated listeners try to escape, and critically: is so good that those sophisticated listeners find themselves listening to it anyway.
It's basically a bouncing, bopping reminder that we aren't as smart as we think we are.
Yeah, if you're looking at it from a composition/music theory angle, it's not your typical 4 chord pop song. There are thirds in the bass all over place that provide interesting contrary motion to the chords, and the verse and chorus are technically in different keys. It's not genius writing but it's definitely not lazy.
Most of the comments here are going to predictably call out that "We Built This City" is not the worst song of all time and offer up an example that's ostensibly worse.
But I think a very important caveat missing from the article and all of the comments here is that Blender/VH1 never said it was the worse song of all time. They said it was the most "awesomely bad" song of all time. To which I 100% agree with. Its not worst songs, its good catchy songs that are also objectively bad. And I think "awesomely bad" is just a great way to title it. We can all agree "We Built This City" is a catchy ear worm you can rock out to in the car, it lifts my spirits whenever it gets played. It stands on the pantheon of terrible but awesome hits like "Ice Ice Baby", "She Bangs", and the Ghostbusters theme song.
Nobody is saying you shouldn't listen to "We Built This City". Its a guilty pleasure. Crank that mother up on your car ride home alone and rock the fuck out.
It's a brilliant song for this reason: Read the lyrics to the song. It's a song about what they now call gentrifcation. The video and song are in the post-corporatized/gentified world where once true rock reigned. It's supposed to sound phony as hell.
I didn't know Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to this song. Man, that's gotta sting.
But if I was making a list of Awful, Terrible Songs, I'm not sure I would have even included this one, mostly because I wouldn't remember it existed. Maybe that's what makes it bad--it was in constant rotation in the 80s, but as soon as they stopped playing it regularly I just... forgot it existed.
Looking at various lists of "Worst Songs" always confuses me. A lot of them are just really popular songs that got overplayed. Wikipedia's page says the Spandau Ballet's "True" is one, which is just nuts.
Phil Collins and Sting both went from hard-rocking tunes to elevator music with very little warning. It’s hard to believe Sting went from The Police to the sublime Bring On The Night to Fields of Gold.
This song brings back good memories for me. Other songs from that era I remember are "Life in a Northern Town", "Walk Like an Egyptian", some Corey Hart songs.
It's a consequentialist sort of "worst": (lack of) artistic quality multiplied by exposure and impact. Couple that with how hard aesthetic quality is to assess and you get some odd lists.
The comments here are pretty funny, and do almost nothing for me more so than highlight the subjectivity of musical taste. I'd never claim to be an authority on music, but as the child of a professional musician and with chops of my own that I'd describe as "good enough to entertain myself and others at times", I love so many of the songs people are ragging on here, "We Built This City" included. Sure, there's plenty of stuff that I don't go out of my way to listen to, and again, subjective, but man, fluffy pop? Corny Christmas Music? Lewd Comedies/Parodies? It's all got it's time and place.
Tearing into a popular piece of media is just really, really cathartic, and much more so if a group of people agrees with you. And if we're gonna be honest its punching up most of the time, so it seems fairly harmless. Someone brought up Nickelback, its not like they've been shoved aside from relevancy, they were super popular the entire time people tore up their music critically. If someone puts them on at karaoke (or if someone puts on Starship for that matter) I'm sure most of the place is going to sing along.
Dylan's gospel albums are classics. Documentaries have been made about how good they are. IIRC "Shot of Love" is one of Dylan's favorites of his own records.
Many fans rejected them at the time because of the culture shock of his religious pivot, but that reaction was about the content, not the music, and has long faded. Nowadays it's understood that the sudden-fan-alienation-move is a Dylan thing, just like when he went electric at Newport in the first place.
I'm not gonna argue that "Man gave names to all the animals" is one of Dylan's finest, but I'd be interested to know which specific tracks you think are terrible, because those records are full of great songs, and so are some of the outtakes.
If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
Admittedly, I’ve only listened to the supposedly-best one (Slow Train Coming, maybe? It’s been a while) and the supposedly-worst one (Saved?) of the three. The former got my toe tapping a couple times IIRC but was mostly forgettable—it was on its account that I allowed that as much as 20% of the three albums, together, might not qualify as very-bad. The latter was back-to-front a slog of a listen. The musical equivalent of contractor-beige painted walls with off-white trim. One of the dullest albums I’ve ever heard, and I owned some stinkers in my high school years.
I sometimes like religious music, so that aspect’s not a deal-breaker for me. One of my favorite local bands was kinda secretly a Christian rock band, they just veiled the references enough and shifted things more-poetic so they didn’t sound ultra cheesy from the very first line like that stuff usually does, and probably some listeners didn’t even notice (they didn’t bill themselves as Christian rock and played normal venues). I love the couple of very-Christian tracks on Springsteen’s Nebraska.
> If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
Sadly(?) that album-trilogy is the latest Dylan I’ve heard, so I can’t say whether it gets worse (but I’d believe it).
Whenever the topic of strikingly bad songs comes up, I always like to link to Spaced Out - The Best of Leonard Nimoy & William Shatner[1] which is an album truly breathtaking in its badness. Everyone I've ever played the CD for has agreed it's the best bad music they've ever heard.
The Muzak system at a retail job I worked played it all the time and we came to despise the song. It became a bit of a proto-Rickroll for those of us who worked there to trick others into hearing it. But the song became much more interesting once I learned about the urban legend connecting it to Mary Ellis. That the writer of the song says there's no connection just makes it that much more enticing.
What are you... Total Eclipse of the Heart is all in power. Were you alive when it was playing on radio all the time? Being played too much doesn't make it bad.
That's a superficial gloss over an even deeper and weirder back story behind the filthiest song ever scrawled on a napkin: https://youtu.be/LGqYnj_Y3CI?t=73
What's wrong with Ghostbusters? It was a perfect song to go with the movie.
On its own, it's probably not something I'd want to listen to much, but while watching the movie, it was fantastic, just like the rest of the movie.
It's much like any soundtrack music. The music by Howard Shore on Lord of the Rings probably isn't something you want to listen to by itself while you're jogging or whatever, but in the movie it's a perfect complement.
As a self-identified metalhead who hated 80's pop in the 80's, I have to agree. Over the years I've gained a newfound respect for a lot of that stuff. So much great music by Bonnie Tyler, Belinda Carlisle, Meatloaf, Bryan Adams, REO Speedwagon, Carly Simon, The Eurythmics, The Bangles, etc. etc. I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to that stuff in 1989 (my metalhead friends would have crucified me, although I did manage to sneak in liking Madonna all along), but these days I dig quite a bit of that stuff.
15 years ago when video chat with strangers was still a popular thing to do on the Internet, whenever I hosted a room, I always used the name "NumberOneBonnieTylerFan" and played her hits in the background. That you do not appreciate her music tremendously saddens me.
OK, I get that satire is hard, but is there really nobody capable of it besides The Onion?
This article was based on a decade-old meme when it was written. That meme didn't particularly need elaboration in 2016, and here in 2024 it has been completely forgotten.
I don't think of GQ as being a great literary magazine, but I thought it had at least some pretension to it. This is weak internet-grade satire.
Right there in the first paragraph: “At the time, Starship's most famous member, singer Grace Slick, was 46.”
Grace Slick was born in 1939, so she was among the oldest of her cohort already in the Sixties. She’s one of the strangest things about pop history for me, right up there with Debbie Harry being over thirty when Blondie hit it big, and Stuart Murdoch being accepted by Glasgow hipster circles well into his late 30s. Pop music is so youth-centered, and that youth audience has often been highly suspicious and deprecating of people much older than them, that it baffles me that these performers still flourished.
A lot of the leaders of the hippies were actually older than that generation, despite the classic "don't trust anyone over 30" and "hope I die before I get old" sentiments of the movement. For example, both Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (who founded the "Youth International Party" or yippies, which mutated into hippies) were born in the 1930s, a decade or more older than most hippies.
Aerosmith was about to call it quits, they did that duet with Run DMC and had another handful of platinum records afterward. Tyler was ~38 when Walk This Way charted the second time. Many of their greatest hits are from after they were old.
And then there was Tom Petty, who had hits in three decades. Practically David Bowie levels of staying power.
Definitely commercial 80s cheese and mastered for a mono clock radio like most 80s soft rock but it seems a bit of hipster stretch to call this the worst or even bad.
The synth and processed drums sit in the mix reasonably well for the time frame. There are some comical 80s songs in the same time frame where the synth really doesn't sit in the mix at all but somehow it remains endearing like Europe's "Final Countdown" or even Don Henley's "Sunset Grill" or Van Halen's "Jump" all of which are rescued by other musical and production value.
Given that Van Halen was primarily a guitar player and just starting to mess with synths in his own home studio where 1984 was recorded, im gonna cut him some slack here. Not disagreeing with your assessment though, the synths on that track are cheesy and a little overwhelming.
EVH was an competition-winning piano player in his youth, and also played the drums for a bit before handing them off to Alex. Their dad was a classical musician.
I assume everyone who thinks We Built This City is the worst song of all time has repressed the memory of Achy-Breaky Heart, which got at least as much radio play.
This 2016 article (posted on the song's 30th anniversary... we're now coming up for its 40th anniversary) is too old to note the LadBaby cover: We Built This City on Sausage Rolls
"Worst Song of All Time" or not, it's still an immensely popular song. If you want to poke fun at the 80s and their obsession with synths, poke fun at Scritti Politi instead! (e.g. Boom! There She Washttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QmDUkxAHgQ)
Meanwhile, the feeling of that 80s synth sound has been reimagined by modern composers, giving us synthwave and all its spinoff genres, and music videos made with an AfterEffects "VHS" plugin, like Turbo Killerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er416Ad3R1g
"Do They Know It's Christmas" usually makes the lists of terrible Christmas music as well.
So much Christmas music is repetitive, but coloring outside the lines is a tough thing to do with Christmas music. The Pogues nailed it with "Fairytale of New York", but it largely appeals only to GenX and younger.
Aaagh you monster it's only November and now that horrible aimless effected wobbly chord fever dream is stuck in my head again. I had at least another couple weeks before hearing it for the first time this year.
I never understood how something could be so bland and yet so revolting at the same time, like a smoothie made of wallpaper paste and dog shit.
I will literally leave a store if this is playing.
But also, the fact that you are damn near guaranteed to run into this song _yearly_ qualifies it to be way higher up than any other song on a "worst song" list (even if it weren't already at #1).
Wow, the rare double penalty. Loss of 5 yards for stooping to a Christmas song for worst song of all time debate, loss of an additional 20 yards for going with a post-Beatles McCartney track. This may be internet bullshit, but by god we have rules.
How does he sing out of tune on his own darn song? If he's not out of tune, those awfully strained high notes shouldn't have been written in whatever weird key they're in.
Yeah, I mean it's pretty silly to declare something "the worst song of all time" - everyone has their personal taste and their own personal songs they love to hate. For me, it's (of course) Wham's Last Christmas and I Will Always Love You (sorry Whitney, but back in the 90s when I was watching a lot of MTV, listening to a lot of radio, and ads for Bodyguard were all over the place, I seem to have developed an allergy to this song).
And BTW, I wouldn't even call this the quintessential 80s song, for me that's Stevie Wonder's I Just Called to Say I Love You, with that cheapo synthesizer bleeping along in the background. Oh well, to quote Calvin Harris, it was "acceptable in the 80s"...
That's actually tied with Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)". Listen carefully and you can hear Yoko Ono screeching incredibly far out of tune as the piece climaxes. It's not in the forefront of the song, but it's there, and it's stuck out so much to me ever since I first noticed it.
Honestly, I find its wackiness quite refreshing. I will always take it over "All I want for Christmas", "Driving Home For Christmas" or "Last Christmas".
If this song isn't proof that Paul McCartney is a psychopath, I don't know what is. It is absolutely the most insipid, uninspired piece of garbage ever to be recorded.
I mean... objectively "10 Coolest Things about New Jersey" is a worse song, but let's not pretend Bloodhound Gang's music is meant to be taken seriously.
And let's be doubly fair, 'Screwing You on a Beach at Night' is a perfectly serviceable techno/dance beat. And a lot of their music is that, perfectly competent. But then they pair it with the stupidest fucking lyrics as possible. Often describing the very themes of most songs in the most crass way possible.
I mean, one of the lyrics is literally "Echo" as it echos. He's just describing the song.
The song I wish the radio would stop playing today is "Murder on the Dance Floor"
Something about the way the singer sings it just feels unusually soulless. After listening to it, I am completely convinced that if the DJ did kill the groove, Ellis-Baxter wouldn't give a shit.
There's a lot of weird revisionism when it comes to judging 1980s music (eg [1]). It actually feels like a lot of 90s kids just being haters. There's been analysis that you basically like whatever was popular when you were 14 [2].
Additionally, it seems like more modern music just isn't enduring [3] in the same way music from the 1950s to 1980s was. Just the fact that people today know about "We Built this City" nearly 40 years after it was released tells you something. I honestly think that unless you grow up in the 2000s you could go and play the music from 2000 to 2010 (as an example) and it would overall be much less recognizable than music from the 1960s and 1970s is.
Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time". It's recognizable. People know it. It has a vibe. Millenials who grew up on 90s grunge may see it differently but that doesn't really mean anything.
Modern music isn't as recognizable because there's way more of it, it's more varied, and doesn't get played a billion times over radio and MTV to a huge audience. The record industry isn't what it was at all, as detailed in your link. Jukeboxes with a selection of hits used to exist, now they're like spotify clients instead. I don't agree with you saying it's less enduring, though. That's a different thing. You shouldn't confuse popularity and number of plays for quality. For me there are some songs I'll hold on to a long time that I first heard in the last 10 years. There's still great music being made, IMO, but then pop from any era rarely was what I'd call good.
Speaking to that, the most played song on Spotify, ever, is "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd. Came out 5 years ago, and it's "okay"; funny enough, it triggers a lot of 80s nostalgia with its instrumentals. So, there's a data point for you to ponder.
What I find really interesting of late is YouTube Music suggesting sleeper hits to me, that were big 20-30 years ago, but somehow missed out on them. "Somewhere Only We Know" has been on rotation in some shopping venues & showed up on my playlist; it was a hit, 20 years ago, yet somehow missed out on it.
> There's a lot of weird revisionism when it comes to judging 1980s music (eg [1]).
Disclaimer, I grew up in the 90s and became an adult around 9/11.
All 80s pop music is terrible with the exception of Thriller. There was an over reliance on cheesy synths and reverbed drum machines, (and cocaine) and almost none of it is redeemable 30 years later. To me, it all sounds dated and bad. If you grew up in the 80s it probably sounds good.
Pop producers and technology finally reached a point in the 90s where electronic synths and drum machines sound cohesive and more natural.
> Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time".
There may be other contenders, but if this song doesn't make the short list for you, I can't explain it. I doubt I could pay anyone to make such an outrageous claim.
It's not a counterargument at all. It's just someone who assumes that there is this great counterargument they haven't bothered to make while whining "there are other bad songs too". Your comment here indicates that you're just too young to have heard it every single day, twice a day, throughout your childhood as it inexplicably got constant airtime. The long ride to and from school on the schoolbus, my first experience with torture. At least on sundays you could turn Solid Gold off. This is like saying "Vietnam wasn't that bad" because you watched a war movie once.
> ... heard it every single day, twice a day, throughout your childhood
If it was so terrible, why did it get played so often?
When I think "terrible", I think of the movie "The Room", which has been called the Citizen Kane of bad movies. It is truly awful. The dialog is awful. The acting is awful. There are all sorts of logical inconsistencies where things inextricably appear and disappear. By any metric it's bad. It's so bad that it has a cult following because it's so bad.
"We Built This City" just isn't anything like that.
Compare it to My Humps [1] or What Does the Fox Say [2] or Friday, just to name a few? These are a few random songs that are all miles worse than We Built This City.
Your comment here indicates that you're just too young to have heard it every single day, twice a day, throughout your childhood as it inexplicably got constant airtime.
So your argument is basically just a no true Scotsman.
I grew up listening to it. I still enjoy it. I also still enjoy Rock Me Amadeus, and Kashagoogoo's Never Ending Story theme, too.
I was ten. How old were you? I ask because your recollection has strong "seething teen" energy.
Its been awhile since I've seen it but Spinal Tap was making fun of a lot of bands like that, its part of their fictional band's backstory. They start out much like the Stones with some simple catchy early 60's tunes, turn into a hippie band, then quickly transform into metal in order to follow the money.
It's happened many times. Fleetwood Mac went from hard blues in the 1970s to straight pop in the 1980s. A surprising number of 1970s prog rock bands (Genesis, Yes, Rush, The Moody Blues) turned into 1980s synth pop bands.
Fleetwood Mac is a good example, actually. Regarding 1970s prog rock bands, their 80s work is for the most part still pretty original and musically honest. One notable outlier is Phil Collins whose solo stuff is truely aweful IMO. (How can you go from being the drummer of Genesis to writing "A Groovy Kind of Love"?)
It was a favorite of mine as a kid. I can still sing the whole thing, including the radio DJ part.
But I also liked Styx. So.
I probably would have liked Rush then too, but wasn’t really exposed to them until later, so they remain in the pile of culture-things I’ll simply never understand.
People bond over mutual hatred even if they didn't come to that hatred on their own. Seems like for this song, it was during slow news period when a list of worst songs came out, and it went viral. Soon it became one of those things that everyone just repeated uncritically, like your mattress doubling in weight due to dead mites. There have been many lists of worst songs before that list and many since, but once "We Built This City" took hold in the collective cultural consciousness as being the worst, there was little that could be done to change the dominate opinion.
For those complaining that it's not "the worst song of all time," yes, we all know it's not the worst song. This includes the clickbaiters who claim it is.
It's cheesy, it's simple, Grace Slick hates it. All those factors make it fashionable to hate it, and it's been like that for a long time. However, it's also catchy, fun, and the lyrics are easy to remember. It's a karaoke staple for all those reasons, good and bad.
This song gave Settlers of Catan players the opportunity to spend ore and (exchanged) lumber to buy a city, and then burst into "We Built This City on Rock and Wood." So it can't be all bad.
Spoiler alert: It's not the worst song of all time. There is no one single "worst song", just as there's no one single "best song". It may be one of the worst, sure. But when doing something this subjective, there's no way everyone in the world universally agrees on everything...including "worst" and "best".
I don't care how many "experts" they asked or whatever, it's not the worst song. It always bugs the heck out of me when I see clickbait crap like this. If they think "We Built This City" is worst than...say..."My Pal Foot-Foot" by The Shaggs, then it just means this writer is full of shit.
On this side-topic, Wikipedia has trouble writing e.g. "worst X of all time", because that can't ever be an objective fact... so instead it has articles named "List of X considered the worst" and "List of X notable for negative reception", to which things like "Worst X of all time" redirect:
Everyone already knows there is no objectively worse song, and the writer knows everyone knows. It's hyperbole to emphasize the writer's opinion that it's a really bad song, an inconsequential rhetorical flourish no reasonable person takes seriously.
Tonight, digging deeper, I found it! I found the source. In 1984, just a year before "We Built this City", Jefferson Starship (the progenitor of Starship, we won't mention the Airplane here) released a video for their ostensible hit single "Layin' it on the Line".
There they were! The Residents! In a terrible, terrible Jefferson Starship video! Sung by Grace Slick and, uh, that dude from Starship!
Strangely, I'll be able to sleep deeply tonight knowing that this mystery that was knawing at my soul for so many years has finally been solved.
That really was just a completely incoherent mess. But the guys with eyeballs on their heads were there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqLnVgR7fLw
https://youtu.be/UJ1tBVtYOBc?si=gSho4eXJMV96onaw
Surely this must have been when some new "clip art for video" technology had just appeared?
The song slaps though.
And what do you have against letting your soul glo? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=961x0NmyHKE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zj7C3GRj7s
Somewhere in here you can hear Jim McKay explaining the difference between "poppers" and "break dancers" and it is just awesome.
~ Humphrey B. Flaubert, TISM, If You're Not Famous at Fourteen, You're Finished - De RigueurMortis (2001)
And well done, GP: I laughed outloud!
In junior high I used to stay up late and watch Letterman. He used to have Chris Elliot the comedian on doing various bits. He had one that imitated the Residents where Chris and several other people dressed up in weird outfits called something like "Maumoshcantz" or something French sounding. Chris' costume had a big black box with three toilet rolls for the face on it and played bizarre, "avant-garde" music. When they finished, Chris came over to sit with Dave. Dave tried to announce the name of the band and Chris scolded him by over pronouncing the name. Then Dave asked what part Chris played and he exclaimed, "I played the guy with toilet rolls on his head Dave! Shesssh!"
I recounted the bit to a friend and he instantly said the whole bit was a tilt of the cap to the band The Residents and it poked fun at their outfits and members on purpose.
This lead me, pre-internet to start digging around to find out what I could about the band. A few weeks later there was some MTV News story about a musician who died that apparently was one of the members. They made light of the fact nobody knew this since the band had purposefully concealed their identities so they could rotate out people as necessary and then say they just wanted people to focus on the music instead. Strangely enough, there was a similar story making the rounds on the internet about something similar that Slipknot was doing and Corey Taylor even used the same reason they wear masks - so fans can focus more in the music! This of course, brought back memories in my own research that eventually concluded with an older brother of a friend who was into really weird stuff and gave me a somewhat sordid history of the The Residents, and some the eerie connections to their management team Cryptic Corporation. He even pulled out several albums saying there's a possibility The Beatles WERE the Residents and showed me the two albums "Meet the Residents" and "Meet the Beatles" album as proof. Keep in mind, I was like 10, my buddies brother was like 16; so imagine how that conversation went down.
Anyways, thanks for bringing this up, it was really fun remembering my own rabbit hole with that band. Which interestingly enough, started with a David Letterman bit and ended with similar rumors swirling around Slipknot.
It should be Mandela effect, but this is the 2nd time I've seen Mandala in its place.
Or didn't he?
Damn that song is great! Seems to have an anti-war message too.
I think the secret sauce is Diane Warren. It's the same reason I love belting out I Don't Want to Miss a Thing at karaoke, or listening to If I Could Turn Back Time on a loop while working.
This post has been sponsored by the Committee to Get Diane Warren into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (CGDWRRHF).
I say that with love as I absolutely love the We Built This City (and Starship for that matter)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
I'd rather hear We built this City 10 times in a row than any 10 songs of Taylor Swift's. How about that?
There are anti-fads, too.
And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.
I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
There was also the bit about gauges and hipsters (which just became the most mainstream). Then there was the fedora hate which I think was the funniest because I knew about it (because I’m chronically online) and then one day I’m traveling through Japan with my friends and the girls are all like “you should try out these hats at this store” and it’s piece for piece exactly what Reddit would hate. But the girls loved it on the lads and I’m married to one now.
It’s like how here people are always like “oh I’d never give X a buck they’re stealing all your data” and then out in the real world people love Google, like adore it. What’s the deal with that?
Campfire Song with 10,000 Maniacs. And Kid Fears with the Indigo Girls still gives me chills.
I like to joke/start arguments by saying that R.E.M's greatest album was "Sentimental Hygiene".
I'll see myself out.
https://youtu.be/VRfhX-XAIiY?t=3820
I don't think I'd even recognize a single Taylor Swift song. I plan to keep it that way, currently she's just a name and a face to me, knowing her music would probably only cause me to dislike her unfairly.
Along those lines, I'd never pay to see Britney Spears perform, but "Toxic" goes hard.
Their music shouldn't make you dislike them. It's not objectively awful, not by a long shot. If anything, just acknowledge we're not the target audience and move on.
I too try to avoid falling into the all-too-typical trope of reflexively hating on what's broadly popular just because it's popular. While I'm also not a big fan of Swift's music, I agree it's consistently very well executed. I also think she deserves genuine respect for remaining both artistically and financially successful for well over a decade without imploding like so many pop stars seem to. I suspect this requires both intelligence and strength of character.
My kids (and their friends too) don't listen to current music either, so I don't get much exposure to it.
In this universe where 90% of music-related journalism boils down to competitive hipster snark.
I love the song, but I was ten when it came out, so of course I do.
In the universe where William Shatner covers it, as he did with "Rocket Man."[0]
So yes, there are many worse songs and even worse renditions of better songs.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Lq8hRIw8c
It's basically a bouncing, bopping reminder that we aren't as smart as we think we are.
But I think a very important caveat missing from the article and all of the comments here is that Blender/VH1 never said it was the worse song of all time. They said it was the most "awesomely bad" song of all time. To which I 100% agree with. Its not worst songs, its good catchy songs that are also objectively bad. And I think "awesomely bad" is just a great way to title it. We can all agree "We Built This City" is a catchy ear worm you can rock out to in the car, it lifts my spirits whenever it gets played. It stands on the pantheon of terrible but awesome hits like "Ice Ice Baby", "She Bangs", and the Ghostbusters theme song.
Nobody is saying you shouldn't listen to "We Built This City". Its a guilty pleasure. Crank that mother up on your car ride home alone and rock the fuck out.
It makes sense in hindsight, but I'm pretty sure it was not intentional :)
But if I was making a list of Awful, Terrible Songs, I'm not sure I would have even included this one, mostly because I wouldn't remember it existed. Maybe that's what makes it bad--it was in constant rotation in the 80s, but as soon as they stopped playing it regularly I just... forgot it existed.
Looking at various lists of "Worst Songs" always confuses me. A lot of them are just really popular songs that got overplayed. Wikipedia's page says the Spandau Ballet's "True" is one, which is just nuts.
I wouldn't. It's not a great song or anything, but I can easily come up with a lengthy list of songs that are far, far worse.
It would Sting more if we were talking about a song like "Fields of Gold."
But that's just like, my opinion, man.
Especially when we live in a world where "Sweet Caroline" (specifically sung by Neil Diamond) is a thing.
Bob Dylan made three records of Christian music and 80% of the tracks from those are definitely worse than anything anyone’s discussing here.
There’s bad, and then there’s bad. The bad stuff is so bad it doesn’t even come up in worst-song conversations. Nor in so-bad-it’s-good conversations.
Many fans rejected them at the time because of the culture shock of his religious pivot, but that reaction was about the content, not the music, and has long faded. Nowadays it's understood that the sudden-fan-alienation-move is a Dylan thing, just like when he went electric at Newport in the first place.
I'm not gonna argue that "Man gave names to all the animals" is one of Dylan's finest, but I'd be interested to know which specific tracks you think are terrible, because those records are full of great songs, and so are some of the outtakes.
If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
I sometimes like religious music, so that aspect’s not a deal-breaker for me. One of my favorite local bands was kinda secretly a Christian rock band, they just veiled the references enough and shifted things more-poetic so they didn’t sound ultra cheesy from the very first line like that stuff usually does, and probably some listeners didn’t even notice (they didn’t bill themselves as Christian rock and played normal venues). I love the couple of very-Christian tracks on Springsteen’s Nebraska.
> If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
Sadly(?) that album-trilogy is the latest Dylan I’ve heard, so I can’t say whether it gets worse (but I’d believe it).
1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k8rGB_NGkgen0y...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellis_grave
Or "Ghostbusters" (sorry, Ray, loved your earlier stuff)?
Or Huey Lewis and the News entire catalog?
... I don't know what to do, I'm always in the dark ... Once upon a time, there was light in my life But now there's only love in the dark ...
Under no circumstances can "power of love" be a bad song
On its own, it's probably not something I'd want to listen to much, but while watching the movie, it was fantastic, just like the rest of the movie.
It's much like any soundtrack music. The music by Howard Shore on Lord of the Rings probably isn't something you want to listen to by itself while you're jogging or whatever, but in the movie it's a perfect complement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_(song)#Lawsuit
It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender
It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender
(these 8 lines are repeated 4 times through the song)
This article was based on a decade-old meme when it was written. That meme didn't particularly need elaboration in 2016, and here in 2024 it has been completely forgotten.
I don't think of GQ as being a great literary magazine, but I thought it had at least some pretension to it. This is weak internet-grade satire.
Grace Slick was born in 1939, so she was among the oldest of her cohort already in the Sixties. She’s one of the strangest things about pop history for me, right up there with Debbie Harry being over thirty when Blondie hit it big, and Stuart Murdoch being accepted by Glasgow hipster circles well into his late 30s. Pop music is so youth-centered, and that youth audience has often been highly suspicious and deprecating of people much older than them, that it baffles me that these performers still flourished.
And then there was Tom Petty, who had hits in three decades. Practically David Bowie levels of staying power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/reader-center/ric-ocasek-...
Dick Taylor was an early member of the Rolling Stones and then in his 40s joined the Mekons and played guitar on some of their best records.
I'm sure there are more fun examples.
The synth and processed drums sit in the mix reasonably well for the time frame. There are some comical 80s songs in the same time frame where the synth really doesn't sit in the mix at all but somehow it remains endearing like Europe's "Final Countdown" or even Don Henley's "Sunset Grill" or Van Halen's "Jump" all of which are rescued by other musical and production value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iEB8bfP7wE
"Worst Song of All Time" or not, it's still an immensely popular song. If you want to poke fun at the 80s and their obsession with synths, poke fun at Scritti Politi instead! (e.g. Boom! There She Was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QmDUkxAHgQ)
Meanwhile, the feeling of that 80s synth sound has been reimagined by modern composers, giving us synthwave and all its spinoff genres, and music videos made with an AfterEffects "VHS" plugin, like Turbo Killer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er416Ad3R1g
(Don't believe me? Listen for yourself: https://youtu.be/94Ye-3C1FC8)
So much Christmas music is repetitive, but coloring outside the lines is a tough thing to do with Christmas music. The Pogues nailed it with "Fairytale of New York", but it largely appeals only to GenX and younger.
I never understood how something could be so bland and yet so revolting at the same time, like a smoothie made of wallpaper paste and dog shit.
But also, the fact that you are damn near guaranteed to run into this song _yearly_ qualifies it to be way higher up than any other song on a "worst song" list (even if it weren't already at #1).
Me too. But, in fairness, that's my instinctive reaction to any Christmas music being played in a store.
The song itself is not bad. This can be demonstrated by listening to Tuxedo cover it (it’s on YouTube)
> (Don't believe me? Listen for yourself: https://youtu.be/94Ye-3C1FC8)
This may not be a felony, but it should be. Have you no shame, sir? A child could accidentally click on that link.
And BTW, I wouldn't even call this the quintessential 80s song, for me that's Stevie Wonder's I Just Called to Say I Love You, with that cheapo synthesizer bleeping along in the background. Oh well, to quote Calvin Harris, it was "acceptable in the 80s"...
"That's a good place to build a city."
"... and roll."
"We're doomed!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTeSkg-YIWI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk8hFuDoYq8
I mean, one of the lyrics is literally "Echo" as it echos. He's just describing the song.
Still not as vapid as Rebecca Black, though https://youtu.be/kfVsfOSbJY0?si=ruKslHtaZuKrBMP-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM4okRvCg2g
Something about the way the singer sings it just feels unusually soulless. After listening to it, I am completely convinced that if the DJ did kill the groove, Ellis-Baxter wouldn't give a shit.
Additionally, it seems like more modern music just isn't enduring [3] in the same way music from the 1950s to 1980s was. Just the fact that people today know about "We Built this City" nearly 40 years after it was released tells you something. I honestly think that unless you grow up in the 2000s you could go and play the music from 2000 to 2010 (as an example) and it would overall be much less recognizable than music from the 1960s and 1970s is.
Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time". It's recognizable. People know it. It has a vibe. Millenials who grew up on 90s grunge may see it differently but that doesn't really mean anything.
[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/readers-poll-...
[2]: https://archive.is/zM4xq
[3]: https://stereomonosunday.com/2019/03/23/why-modern-music-is-...
What I find really interesting of late is YouTube Music suggesting sleeper hits to me, that were big 20-30 years ago, but somehow missed out on them. "Somewhere Only We Know" has been on rotation in some shopping venues & showed up on my playlist; it was a hit, 20 years ago, yet somehow missed out on it.
Disclaimer, I grew up in the 90s and became an adult around 9/11.
All 80s pop music is terrible with the exception of Thriller. There was an over reliance on cheesy synths and reverbed drum machines, (and cocaine) and almost none of it is redeemable 30 years later. To me, it all sounds dated and bad. If you grew up in the 80s it probably sounds good.
Pop producers and technology finally reached a point in the 90s where electronic synths and drum machines sound cohesive and more natural.
There may be other contenders, but if this song doesn't make the short list for you, I can't explain it. I doubt I could pay anyone to make such an outrageous claim.
If it was so terrible, why did it get played so often?
When I think "terrible", I think of the movie "The Room", which has been called the Citizen Kane of bad movies. It is truly awful. The dialog is awful. The acting is awful. There are all sorts of logical inconsistencies where things inextricably appear and disappear. By any metric it's bad. It's so bad that it has a cult following because it's so bad.
"We Built This City" just isn't anything like that.
Compare it to My Humps [1] or What Does the Fox Say [2] or Friday, just to name a few? These are a few random songs that are all miles worse than We Built This City.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEe_eraFWWs
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE
So your argument is basically just a no true Scotsman.
I grew up listening to it. I still enjoy it. I also still enjoy Rock Me Amadeus, and Kashagoogoo's Never Ending Story theme, too.
I was ten. How old were you? I ask because your recollection has strong "seething teen" energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K75cj0FmGHM
But I also liked Styx. So.
I probably would have liked Rush then too, but wasn’t really exposed to them until later, so they remain in the pile of culture-things I’ll simply never understand.
It's cheesy, it's simple, Grace Slick hates it. All those factors make it fashionable to hate it, and it's been like that for a long time. However, it's also catchy, fun, and the lyrics are easy to remember. It's a karaoke staple for all those reasons, good and bad.
I mean, how can this song be the worst song?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRE-LYqwAi8
Glad to know I'm not alone.
I don't care how many "experts" they asked or whatever, it's not the worst song. It always bugs the heck out of me when I see clickbait crap like this. If they think "We Built This City" is worst than...say..."My Pal Foot-Foot" by The Shaggs, then it just means this writer is full of shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobiles_known_for_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_considered_the_w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_considered_the_w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_shows_notab...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sitcoms_known_for_nega...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_notable_fo...
In each category, it picks criteria like press reviews or user ratings that mark a work for being considered "worst"
Just remembered "Rico Suave," gonna nominate that one as well.