The ’80s Starship Hit Grace Slick Called the “Worst Song Ever”

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.”

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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 one of the early pioneers of 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.

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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

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.”

Photo: Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images