We Built This City
| "We Built This City" | ||||||||
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| Single by Starship | ||||||||
| from the album Knee Deep in the Hoopla | ||||||||
| B-side | "Private Room" (Instrumental) | |||||||
| Released | August 1, 1985 | |||||||
| Format | 7" | |||||||
| Recorded | May 1985 | |||||||
| Genre | Pop rock | |||||||
| Length | 4:56 | |||||||
| Label | Grunt | |||||||
| Writer(s) | Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, Peter Wolf | |||||||
| Producer(s) | Peter Wolf, Jeremy Smith | |||||||
| Starship singles chronology | ||||||||
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"We Built This City" is a 1985 song written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Wolf, and originally recorded by US rock group Starship and released as their debut single on their album Knee Deep in the Hoopla.
The single version reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 on 16 November 1985, and also number one on the US Top Rock Tracks chart and number twelve in the UK. Despite the song's commercial success, it has appeared on several "worst song" lists, topping a 2011 Rolling Stone poll of worst songs of the 1980s by a wide margin.
What exists of a narrative in the song consists of an argument between the singers (Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick) and an unidentified "you", presumably a music industry executive, who is marginalizing the band and ripping off money from them by "playing corporation games" ("who counts the money underneath the bar?"). In response to this injustice, the singers remind the villain of their importance and fame: "Listen to the radio! Don't you remember? We built this city on rock and roll!" A spoken-word interlude explicitly mentions the Golden Gate Bridge and refers to "the city by the bay", a common moniker for Starship's hometown of San Francisco; Starship's predecessors, Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, were prominent members of San Francisco's psychedelic rock scene in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. However, the interlude then follows in rapid fashion by referring to the same city as "the city that rocks", a reference to Cleveland, Ohio (home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum), and then "the city that never sleeps", one of the nicknames for New York City. Capitalizing on the ambiguity, several radio stations added descriptions of their own local areas when they broadcast the song, or even simply added their own ident in its place.
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Wikipedia