121. "We Built This City" by Starship
This may very well be the worst song in rock 'n' roll. And I'm not alone in that opinion. VH1 put it at #1 on their list of the "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs...Ever." In 2011, a reader's poll for Rolling Stone magazine voted it as the worst song of the 80s. And in 2016, GQ magazine identified it as the "the most detested song in human history." Even Grace Slick hated it.
Grace Slick (Starship vocalist; ‘Vanity Fair,’ June 2012): I was such an asshole 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. 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 shitting me, that's the worst song ever.
But while Grace and most of the other 7.5 billion people on the planet love to hate this song, I hate to love it. The song came out while I was in Sweden, which meant I was only supposed to hear rock 'n' roll music when I was out in public or if people played it while we were visiting them. So when I had a chance to listen to a new rock song, I really paid attention to it and tried to squeeze as much enjoyment out of the experience as I could. And this song got really lucky and just happened to play on the radio when my companion and I were riding home in the back seat of Lars Nordlof's Saab right after we baptized him. His girlfriend Annalee liked the song, so she turned it up, knowing that the two missionaries in the car would also like to hear it played loud. She was a member and had been around missionaries all her life, so she kind of figured out that a lot of missionaries liked to hear something beside the tabernacle choir from time to time. My companion and I just grinned at each other when she turned it up. We rocked the song while driving at high speed down a Swedish country road in the dark. It may very well be the happiest moment of my mission.
And that's how the "worst song ever" became a song that I can't help but love.
But even though I love the song, I do hate the video. If you took everything bad you'd ever seen in an 80s video and spliced it all together, you'd still have something ten times better than this. Human language is incapable to describing the level of awfulness that this video attains, so I won't even try. I should probably not post it here or even encourage others to watch it, but it's an 80s video trainwreck you really can't force yourself not to look at.
Fear not, dear reader, as this is the last time you'll hear a Starship song or see a Starship video on the countdown. It will NOT, however, be the last time you'll hear or see an actual starship. But none of the starships you will see will be from a Starship album cover, because for some reason beyond reason, there are no images of starships on any of their four album covers. And I'm not sure why, but I'm okay with that.
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