We Built This City

"We Built This City" is the debut single by American rock band Starship, from their 1985 debut album Knee Deep in the Hoopla. It was written by English musicians Martin Page and Bernie Taupin, who were both living in Los Angeles at the time, and was originally intended as a lament against the closure of many of that city's live music clubs.

The song peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Outside the United States, "We Built This City" topped the charts in Australia and Canada, peaked inside the Top 10 of the charts in Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland, the Top 20 on the charts in Belgium, New Zealand and the United Kingdom and the Top 30 of the charts in Austria and the Netherlands.

Although Billboard and Cash Box magazines positively reviewed the song upon its release, significant criticism surfaced in later years, both for the inscrutability of its lyrics and the purported contrast between the song's anti-corporate message and its polished, "corporate rock" sound. It topped a 2011 Rolling Stone poll of worst songs of the 1980s by a wide margin, and the magazines Blender and GQ both called it the worst song of all time.

The album's title, Knee Deep in the Hoopla, is taken from a lyric in the first verse of this song.

Song co-writers Martin Page and Bernie Taupin have stated that the song is about the decline of live-performance clubs in Los Angeles during the 1980s. In 2013, Taupin told Rolling Stone that the "original song was a very dark kind of mid-tempo song ... about how club life in L.A. was being killed off and live acts had no place to go ... A guy called Peter Wolf [the album's producer] ... got ahold of the demo and totally changed it. He jerry-rigged it into the pop hit it was". In an interview with Songfacts, Page added that the "demo was quite high-energy techno, because that was the sound of the band I was in ... it was a little more edgy. And I'm very pleased with what Starship did with it, because they made it a universally appealing song".

Though "We Built This City" was originally written about Los Angeles, the Starship rendition references San Francisco (the hometown of both Starship and its predecessors, Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship). MTV executive and former DJ Les Garland provided the DJ voiceover during the song's bridge. While "the city by the bay" refers to San Francisco, the other two phrases used by Garland—"the city that rocks" and "The City That Never Sleeps"—refer to Cleveland, Ohio, and New York City, respectively. To capitalize on this, several radio stations, with the help of jingle company JAM Creative Productions, customized the bridge when broadcasting the song by adding descriptions of their own local areas or inserting their idents.

The song was engineered by producer Bill Bottrell, written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert and Peter Wolf and arranged by Bottrell and Jasun Martz with shared lead vocals by Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick.

Initially, "We Built This City" had positive reviews. Billboard said in 1985 that this "unusual rock 'n' roll anthem is as wise as it is rebellious". Cash Box called it "an ear-catching tune" and described it as "dance rock with sharp hooks".