There’s no question that Starship’s “We Built This City” was a giant hit. After all, it went all the way to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985, and it was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group in 1986. In the years since, it’s been streamed over 600 million times. Then again, it was also voted the “Worst Song of the ’80s” by Rolling Stone readers in 2011, a competition it won by a landslide; plenty of other critics have expressed similar opinions over the years. Even Grace Slick didn’t like the song, though she agreed to sing it to make up for being difficult in the past.
“I was such an a—hole for a while,” Slick told Vanity Fair in 2012.
“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,” she added. “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 & Roll.’ Oh, you’re s—ting me, that’s the worst song ever.”
In a 2020 interview with Uncut magazine, Slick didn’t seem to have grown any fonder of the song.
“We built this city on rock and roll? There isn’t any city built on rock and roll,” she said. “If you’re talking about LA, 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 went on to point out that “Bernie Taupin wrote the song about clubs closing in LA.”
“But clubs are not going to close forever in a city like LA,” she pointed out. “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 #1 in the ’80s. I didn’t believe the lyrics of any of them.”
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Martin Page, who co-wrote “We Built This City” with Taupin, offered a more nuanced take on his personal inspiration for the song in a 2014 interview with Songfacts.
“To me, ‘We Built This City’ is live music’s been pulled away from the streets of LA,” he explained. “We want to get back to rock and roll and play it live. When I wrote it, it still had that feeling to me like something’s wrong here. The corporations had taken away great live music. We’re being stamped on, the rock was being stamped on. The line, ‘we just lost the beat’ reiterated to me the wrecking ball. It’s knocking down live music, it’s being tramped on by corporations and commerciality.”
Page went on to point out that while it was “such a commercial song…but if you look at the lyrics deeply — and one day people will take it and listen to the demo we did — it has an ominous feel about it. As Bernie says, the song was jury-rigged to make the chorus come home, which I think was a very, very wise decision by the producers.”
Despite Slick’s reluctance to sing “We Built This City,” the song became a particularly significant one for her: When it hit the top of the charts, the 46-year-old broke a record set by Tina Turner the year before and became the oldest woman to ever sing a #1 song. (Turner was 44 when “What’s Love Got to Do With It” made it to #1 in 1984, according to Stereogum.) Slick’s record was broken by none other than Cher, who was 52 years old when “Believe” went to #1 in 1999.
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