we built this unwitty excuse for droll Aug 19 '06 (Updated Aug 26 '06)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet The Bottom Line (In which the author renounces his critical credibility forever.) VH-1, a year or two back, gained attention by doing a countdown show of “the 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever”, with bland low-wattage celebrities trying to be funny, explaining why they felt these songs sucked. I dislike the whole idea behind such a list, for two reasons; I’ll get to the logical one later, the emotional one being “That’s a mean way to spend time”. Other than that, I found the list more puzzling than anything else: although I do dislike the bulk of the songs on it, there’s very few I see much need to be passionate about. “Ice, Ice, Baby”, sure: for several years the “Under Pressure” piano hook would come on the store or restaurant soundsystem, and instead of me looking forward to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury singing their hearts out, I had to cringe at a mindless, tuneless rap and a structureless replay of the same damn hook, over and over until it was no longer fun. The issue is less “I don’t like the song” – yeah, well, so what? – than “this is vandalism”. Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” is venomous, proudly ignorant, and xenophobic; that’s worth minding. Ruben Stoddard’s “Sorry 2004” is clearly taking the flak for American Idol’s perceived sins, but it’s amazingly whiny, self-pitying, and repetitious even by pop-song standards. Other than those three? All I see is a list of songs that some judges didn’t like. “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”, by Wang Chung, is my personal key to understanding the list. From the age of eight til I graduated high school, my Mom and I lived about 200 yards from the Outing Club (or as I called it, the Outhouse Club), where debutante balls and such were held by people we certainly couldn’t afford to meet. A few times a year, they’d be blasting music late into the night, so loudly that it would be the loudest thing in our house, and I’d stay awake, bombarded and miserable. They would always, always, be Wang Chunging that night. But is that Wang Chung’s fault? Not really, no. It’s a dumb song like sixty zillion other dumb songs, harmless until turned into a loaded weapon by a bunch of rich Iowan freaks. Mostly, I assume the VH-1 list is about exactly this kind of misplaced blame and vengeance. Stupid, but whatever. If it had been made in private and posted on some out-of-the-way blog, it would have been harmless. I like maybe ten of the chosen songs. Still, beyond the principle of the thing, I only had real problems with three selections. “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by Crash Test Dummies and “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred didn’t have any business being considered: VH-1 claimed it was trying to deflate pretentions, so why pick on songs that don’t have any? As for “We Built This City”, by Starship, I couldn’t see how such a peppy, tuneful song had possibly been loathed enough to earn the #1 spot: the Absolute Worst Song Ever (Counting “Ever” as “Since the Late 1960s When We Started Paying Attention”). I was to find out, though: from VH-1's show, and from the increasing frequency with which I’d run into insulting references to the song elsewhere. (People love to attack from the protection of their herd.) Meanwhile, though, Cindy started waking up to a radio station which, unaware of “We Built This City”’s awesome badness, plays it now and then. What I have learned, on repeat listens, is that “We Built This City” is (to me) an absolutely great song; if I made a list of the 50 best hit singles ever, I’m sure I’d find room for it. Will I convince you of of its greatness? Probably not. But I do want to make a case, after taking a look at the arguments used to put it down. ********** (1) “It’s the truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate dollar…” Irrelevant. In 1985, there was no way Starship could have made a record sounding like “We Built” on Do It Yourself equipment and budget. Hold your snappy comeback, please; we’ll get back to this. (2) “…while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar”. This is incorrect. I don’t want to imply that the lyrics are unusually good, or even unusually clear, but I hear two actual targets in the lyrics. One would be people who accept corporate bribes (“Who counts the money underneath the bar?”). In context, we assume she means DJ’s and radio station program directors taking payola. Given the Starship members’ long background as outspoken idealists, I see no evidence, none, that they asked (or wanted) RCA to pay anyone to play their song … although I do grant the irrelevant likelihood that it happened anyway. Other than that, it is the corporations who are challenged, along with a system that allows corporations control of many things beyond the making and distribution of product. “We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage”: one of the shaping trends in American life, over the last forty years, has been the disappearance of public space – parks, town squares, pedestrian-designed downtowns – in favor of privately-held malls. In public spaces, poor people have as much right to mingle as the rich. In public spaces, the first amendment allows parades and protests, rallies and puppet theaters, babble and quiet and the sheer freedom to look around without being confronted with ads and price-tags (“Knee-deep in the hoopla”). We’ve lost true public television, too, and the National Endowment for the Arts is shrinking as corporate sponsorship fills the gaps, requiring that more and more art double as shill. Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, and their bandmates did not cause this, nor by accepting RCA’s budget did they make these trends worse. “Someone’s always playing corporation games. Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names”. A simple rhyme, and yes it sound really funny coming from Starship, formerly Jefferson Starship, who began as Jefferson Airplane. But let’s not confuse the messenger with the message. The moral and intellectual defense of capitalism rests on the idea that property-holders will make rational, long-term decisions, since they own the property and have an interest in its long-term usefulness. But the 1980s were a record decade – until the 1990s, and then the 2000s – for mergers and leveraged buyouts: for companies to be brought into a conglomerate’s fold, ransacked for short-term gain (properties sold off, personnel fired, patents stolen), then spun off into newly separate companies again. The pay rate for corporate CEO’s increased at a staggering rate even as the median wage for normal people barely kept up with inflation, and a typical corporate official jumped companies every three-to-five years to find a larger salary. This gave him no reason to look after his current company’s stability. All of this was relatively new, and important: there _is_ no moral argument for letting profit run the country if it is short-term profit. When the market is out of control, it’s only fair to be nervous, and to sing about it. The last three arguments I’m unable to phrase as direct quotes from VH-1, but the claims go roughly like: (3) The shiny, polished music is a loathsome betrayal of the “rock and roll” Starship longs for. I do think the term “rock and roll” is most useful when used to refer to the kind of rock-and-roll available in the 1950s: raw, primitive, simple, energetic, generally under three minutes. Developments since then are more commonly encompassed as just “rock”. But while that’s the majority usage by now, I’m not sure it was as of 1985, and even now there’s no consensus. So consider the song as “rock”. “We Built This City” is upbeat: it moves, you can dance to it. It uses rock music structure: verses, chorus, multiple bridges. It’s built on hooks: in order throughout the first eighty seconds, we’re introduced to a vocal hook; a bouncy eight-bar bass riff; an ascending verse melody; a three-line pre-chorus; the vocal hook (now revealed as the chorus); and a bubbly little synthesizer melody filling space between lines. Those are the main ingredients, but later there’s a couple of short but powerful drum-machine fills, a tuneful little guitar solo. A little over halfway in, a verse is played as the melodic inverse of the normal verse, frantically sung, and a whistly new synth hook follows that. In the last forty seconds, there’s some new vocal interplay. That’s without giving any credit for the little variations spun in the arrangement as parts repeat. All of it – every ingredient – is played and sung in a catchy, energizing way. Now, I’m arguing structure, and I think VH-1 is arguing instrumentation. I say “bass” and mean “bass synthesizer” ; synths and drum machines, they mean, can’t be rock music. This makes no sense to me, first of all: electric guitars are every bit as artificial a separation between the fingers playing the music and the noise that comes out, so I’m led to conclude that the reason Les Paul and Bo Diddley didn’t use synthesizers is that synthesizers weren’t around yet. In the days of Jefferson Airplane, Grace and Paul and the band didn’t make music that glistened because no one did. That they would use a versatile new tool is opportunistic only in the creative sense. Me, I love the noises they pull out of their new equipment. But: If you don’t like synths and drum machines, I’m at a loss to understand why you’d focus your rage on “We Built This City”. Except for the vocal treatments, it’s processed like a Cars song: the sound is artificial (as, again, are electric guitar songs), but lean. Pat Benatar, a supposed hard-rock star, was putting out far more densely processed material; so were Whitesnake and Poison, who claimed to be heavy-metal. So were the Rolling Stones, even. Def Leppard’s songs were almost impossible to detect under the hundreds of layers of glitter and glow their producer draped them in. To my mind, that’s a good thing, but at any rate their “Rock of Ages” and “Rock, Rock, Til You Drop” would have to count as far more hypocritical … if you need to find any kind of hypocrisy. (4) “We Built This City” was written for no other purpose than to be a moneymaking hit. You don’t know this is true, and I don’t know this is false. Since the same can be said of nearly every hit song, it’s random to make the claim re: this particular hit. But to take the claim seriously, the question to ask is, _if_ a band wanted to write a generic moneymaking hit in 1985, is “We Built This City” the song they would write? I submit that it is not. >> The lyrics are not about love, or sex, or romantic longing. They are protest lyrics, sixteen years past the expiration date on hit protest songs. >> The lyrics are backward-looking, about the glories of music past. The lyrics, if insincere, are then obviously pitched to 40-somethings … but to pitch to 40-somethings, Starship absolutely _would_ have used the more old-fashioned production VH-1 seems to think is called for. >> The music, though lean and hooky (see above), is far more complicated than it needs to be. Put the song on, if you can, and listen to a verse, perhaps the “corporation games” one. 25% of the way in, the verse is modulating to a different key, and a non-obvious key – then, seconds later, it modulates again, to an even less obvious one, while syncopating and stuttering the rhythm. The pre-chorus is, itself, a luxury: most hit songs plod directly from verse to chorus, saving the band effort. This pre-chorus switches keys a couple more times, though, and the chorus melody is BIG: Grace Slick’s vocals take plunges half the car-bound audience wouldn’t be able to accurately follow. The bridge kicks into gear a beat early. Yes, “We Built This City” was a massive hit. It could not have been a massive hit without being released by a major corporation, and it made money for that corporation – but it made money because it took a series of creative risks that worked. It made money, in my opinion, because the melodies are fantastic. ********** But then there’s (5) Grace Slick herself has come to admit, many years later, that she was “acting” as she sang, and didn’t believe in the song. Aha!, you say. There’s a clincher, right? No, it’s not. Analogy time, please: journey with me back to 1989. Violent crime rates were the highest they’d been in the memory of almost anyone living, higher than they’ve been ever since either, several times what they’d been in the 1950s. (The highest violent crime rates in U.S. history were recorded in the 1890s, but that was, understandably, beside the point.) White academics were blaming the phenomenon on “superpredators”, joyfully violent black members of what was becoming known as the “underclass”, and white people in general were listening. New York City was especially tense. A black man had been murdered in white Bensonhurst when he tried to answer a For Sale ad on a car there, and a white man named Bernhard Goetz had been acquitted – not just acquitted, lionized – for shooting four young black men who approached him on the subway asking for money. Then came the Central Park Jogger: a woman was raped, beaten, and murdered while out for a run one night. Five young black men were tried and convicted for the crime: the term “wilding” was coined to describe the sport they’d had, going out with the specific plan of finding (white) female prey. Not everything about the story made sense. There’d been a lot of crimes in the park that night, and a lot of people walking around: no one had seen the five men. There weren’t any blood tests or fingerprints or DNA results to link the men to the murder. The ravine had been muddy, the meeting violent, but nothing had rubbed off on the men. But! They’d confessed, or four of them had. On videotape. Three of them were with their parents at the time. Okay, so their confessions conflicted a lot, didn’t really make any sense together as a story. Still, they’d confessed, so obviously they were guilty. In 2002, with the statute of limitations run out, a jailbird named Matias Reyes – whose M.O. had always been to rape and kill alone – confessed that he had killed the Central Park Jogger. The DNA was re-tested: it did, indeed, show him to be the killer. The four young men had confessed to something they did not do. We do not know the specifics of why they spoke up, although we do know they hadn’t been allowed to sleep for 48 hours. Probably other forms of pressure were applied, in the days before the video cameras were turned on. I doubt the forms of pressure were anything at the level of the abuses committed at Abu Ghriab, or Guantanamo Bay, but if so that only proves they didn’t need to be. At some point, confessing to an imaginary crime came to seem easier, to four of the five boys, than insisting on the truth. Now, okay. Starship have not been apprehended by police for “We Built This City” (though if they had, they seem the type not to play along with hostile cops). Further, they’ve made big money from it, and made many people happy with the song. But they know – they are told over and over – that the song is crap. How much easier would their lives be, then, if they decided that yes, of course the song is crap; that people who don’t like it should kindly _stop judging them for it_? It must have been tempting. Big Country admitted Peace in Our Time was a mistake; Peter Blegvad turned on Knights Like This; Warren Zevon never repeated the chilly futuristic mood of Transverse City, and didn’t revisit its songs in concert. That’s just in response to the pathetic level of pressure that can be applied by Big Country, Peter Blegvad, and Warren Zevon fans. I like those records a lot, but then, I didn’t agree when the national mood changed in 1991, and it became necessary to denounce synthesizers in order to have any indie cred. And I _can_ like those records, because it’s not me being chewed out for making them. ********** This, then, is why I dislike lists of Awesomely Bad Songs a lot more than I dislike any of the songs on the list (besides “Ice Ice Baby”). The lists are tools for shaming, for scapegoating. They are tools for rewriting history and flushing old events, old emotions and passions and loves, down the memory hole. They are tools for making people feel really, really bad, and the tools work. You don’t know and I don’t know what the 50 worst songs ever are, because we’ve surely never heard them. I know, it’s hard for me to imagine a song worse than Black Eyed Peas' “My Humps”, but compare these earnestly-sung, irony-free lyrics: I’m gonna get, get, get, get you drunk, Get you love drunk off my hump. My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, My hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps to these earnestly-sung, irony-free lyrics: Rudolph Hess, a man of peace, he wouldn’t give up, he wouldn’t cease. He gave his loyalty to our cause, Remember him and give a pause. Dr. Pierce, a man so wise, Helped so many of us open our eyes, See the future for what it could be, A future for our Race’s eternity. [Hess and Pierce were Nazis, authors of the murder of millions, which only makes appalling lyrics far worse; the band is Prussian Blue, stars of the "white pride" music scene.] The latter song was not a hit – and its dance music is lazier, its production thinner, than that of the Black-Eyed Peas. It never will be a hit, because it is worse than even the worst stuff on the radio. That's just an example I happen, by accident, to know. You take my point? Music exists for many reasons, but the simplest is: to make us happy, as opposed to making us unhappy. The discussion, then, should normally be about what makes good music good. Personally, I find that writing about Starship fits the bill.

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