About We Built This City

"We Built This City" is a 1985 song by American rock band Starship. It was released as their debut single on their album Knee Deep in the Hoopla. The song peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Outside the United States, "We Built This City" topped the charts in Australia and Canada, peaked inside the top ten of the charts in Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland, the top twenty of the charts in Belgium, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and the top thirty of the charts in Austria and the Netherlands. It has appeared on several "worst song" lists, topping a 2011 Rolling Stone poll of worst songs of the 1980s by a wide margin.

The lyrics consist of an argument between the singers (Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick) and an unidentified "you", presumably a music industry executive, who is marginalizing the band and ripping them off by "playing corporation games" ("Who counts the money underneath the bar?"). In response to this injustice, the singers remind the villain of their importance and fame, as well as the importance of radio as a music distribution medium: "Marconi plays the mamba, listen to the radio! Don't you remember? We built this city on rock and roll!" A spoken-word interlude explicitly mentions the Golden Gate Bridge and refers to "the city by the bay", a common moniker for Starship's hometown of San Francisco. Starship's predecessors, Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, were prominent members of San Francisco's psychedelic rock scene in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. However, the interlude then refers to the same city as "the city that rocks", a reference to Cleveland, Ohio (home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum), and then "the city that never sleeps", one of the nicknames for New York City. Capitalizing on the ambiguity, several radio stations added descriptions of their own local areas when they broadcast the song or added their own ident in its place. Song co-writers Martin Page and Bernie Taupin have said they originally wrote the song as being about the decline of live performance clubs in Los Angeles during the 1980s. The album's title Knee Deep in the Hoopla is taken from a lyric in the first verse of this song.