The Most Detested Song in Human History’ Has Been Streamed Hundreds of Millions of Times
As one of the pioneering psychedelic rock bands of the ’60s and ’70s, Jefferson Airplane won legions of devoted fans with songs like “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” But by the time the ’80s rolled around, Jefferson Airplane had morphed into Jefferson Starship — and then just Starship — developing a very different sound in the process, as evidenced by their now-infamous track “We Built This City”…which just might be the most widely-reviled #1 hit of all time.
Written for Starship by English musicians Martin Page and Bernie Taupin, the “city” in the title is actually Los Angeles, as Taupin explained to Rolling Stone in 2013.
The original song was a very dark kind of mid-tempo song, and it didn’t have all this ‘We built this city!’ It had none of that,” Taupin recalled.
It was a very dark song about how club lifein L.A. was being killed off and live acts had no place to go,” he continued. “It was a very specific thing. A guy called Peter Wolf — not J. Geils Peter Wolf, but a big-time pop guy and German record producer — got ahold of the demo and totally changed it. He jerry-rigged it into the pop hit it was. If you heard the original demo, you wouldn’t even recognize the song.”
The song was indeed a “pop hit,” as Taupin put it, hitting #1 on the charts in the U.S., Canada and Australia in 1985. However, in the decades since, it seems the world at large changed its collective mind about the tune.
As Ultimate Classic Rock reported, multiple major media outlets and critics have blasted “We Built This City” over the years: In 2004, VH1 and Blender magazine placed it at the very top of their list of The 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs…Ever; in 2011, Rolling Stone’s readers voted the tune the worst song of the ’80s. GQ went so far as to call it “the most detested song in human history,” while Stephen Holden of The New York Times dismissed the whole album (Knee Deep in the Hoopla) as a “compendium of strutting pop-rock clichés” in 1985, complaining that it represented “the ’80s equivalent of almost everything the original Jefferson Airplane stood against — conformity, conservatism, and a slavish adherence to formula
Grace Slick wasn’t a fan of ‘We Built This City’ either
Even Starship singer Grace Slick has expressed her distaste for the tune, despite its commercial success.
“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 continued. “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.”
Worst song or not, “We Built This City” has been streamed on Spotify over 669 million times as of this month, according to data collected by Kworb.net. So clearly, people are still listening…whether or not they want to admit it.
