We Think The Worst Song Of The '80s Is This Self-Congratulatory Slog, And Reddit Agrees

While the "decade of decadence" certainly produced a lot of great music, such as a bunch of fan-certified classic rock albums, the '80s also generated a lot of smug, corny, and hollow stuff that didn't age very well. In 2021, Grunge asked readers to name the worst song of the 1980s, and 23% said "Kokomo," the Beach Boys' comeback smash from 1988. It makes us cringe thinking about how a lazy ripoff of the life's work of Jimmy Buffett was a No. 1 hit, but a few more years have passed, and another deplorable comeback hit from an aging and irrelevant '60s relic seems even worse. No matter how much we want Starship's 1985 No. 1 hit "We Built This City" to leave our heads and the airwaves, it never does.

The most pointed music critics on the internet can back us up on this. We went to Reddit and a few other sources to find out what people had to say about this abomination of a song: "Oh, it is really a terrible song. It lyrically makes no sense, but from what I can piece together it is unironically trying to make a critical statement about the commercialized selling out of rock-n-roll all the while being a super sell for the band singing it," wrote A_friend_called_Five on Reddit in one of the site's many discussions about terrible '80s music. "And the sound of it is really the epitome of 80s cheesiness."

Here's how — and why — "We Built This City" built up its reputation as the worst song of the 1980s.

It's hard to believe that essentially the same band that made "White Rabbit," "Somebody to Love," and other psychedelic entries in the soundtrack for the '60s San Francisco-centered countercultural movement is also responsible for auditory drivel like "We Built This City." In the '70s, Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship, an arena rock band, and then reached its final form as Starship, a synth-driven soft rock-radio act.

What's especially gross about "We Built This City" is that Starship seems to take credit for changing the world through its music, with the band (or the outside songwriters who actually composed the song) giving out an unearned "You're welcome." By embracing the smooth, mechanical, commercial sound of '80s radio (criticized in the lyrics), Starship shows that the only thing that changed was Starship, and for the worse. "We Built This City" doesn't sound anything like the provocative and political fare it made in the '60s. 

That's a big problem. "Just the saddest self-congratulatory Boomer crap-rock," one anonymous Redditor accused. "And the lyrics complain about corporate rock ruining the Bay Area music scene, but the whole song is maybe the most corporate sounding '80s rock song ever," another poster commented. "That song also marks a real fall from grace for the Starship crew who were paragons of pure 60s psychedelia," Redditor Pherllerp said in another discussion.

There's plenty to loathe about "We Built This City." The music is soulless, the chords are simplistic, and singers Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas screech in unison about being "knee-deep in the hoopla" or how "Marconi plays the mambo." And right in the middle of the song, there's a radio station's traffic report. The wrecking ball to tear down this "City" started flying in 2003, when Blender and VH1 called the Starship track the worst song not just of the '80s, but of all time. It won a 2011 Rolling Stone poll to identify the worst songs of the 1980s, and took top place in a similar one held on Reddit in 2021. Otherwise, the tune often comes up when the topic is bad '80s music, or just bad music in general. "It's the worst rock and roll song EVER, not just the 80s," said Redditor slobeck. "Absolutely insufferable, indulgent crap." agreed Wab-Sabi_Umami.

Not only do those forced to listen to "We Built This City" hate the song — so did the musician who sang co-lead vocals on it. "I was such an a****** for a while. I was trying to make up for it by being sober, which I was all during the '80s," Grace Slick told Vanity Fair in 2012. "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****ing me, that's the worst song ever."