the first round
(1) starship, “we built this city”
outgentrified
(16) doobie brothers, “real love”
190-116
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, watch the videos (if available), listen to the songs, feel free to argue, tweet at us, and consider. Then vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 3.

Is the Worst Song of All Time Actually the Best? alison stine on “we built this city”

On the last night of 2019, my partner and I had dinner in a former mortuary.
It was a popular restaurant, fancy. We had trouble with the drink menu, not wanting to order edible gold. The mortuary, in a historically Latino neighborhood, had been named after the family that owned it. The restaurateurs had just taken one letter off the sign to re-name it, decorated the space with prayer fans and paintings of coffins. We wondered if the rich people dining around us knew the history.
My partner was born and raised in the city, Denver, which has had a huge influx of young, wealthy white people. Much of his family still lived here. Just not where they had been for generations. Right up the street from the restaurant had been his grandparents’ house. Then it was torn down, replaced by condos.
A few days earlier, we were at my parents’ house in rural Ohio when my sister pulled up a picture on her phone. She had driven by the small farm where my mother was born, where the family had grown corn, soybean, and winter wheat. I didn’t know the farm had been sold—but now it was demolished. The tiny, red, two bedroom house where my grandparents had raised six children was gone, replaced by a McMansion, a much more lavish house than my grandparents had ever stepped foot in, let alone lived in.
How did “We Built This City,” the first hit for Starship, the rock band that members of Jefferson Starship morphed into, become the worst song of all time? Like a hipster mortuary restaurant, like a McMansion on my farming family’s land, it started out as something very different. And real.
They were simple, the lyrics Bernie Taupin wrote. A simple song about a specific story: the closing of live music clubs in LA. You can still hear the bones of this song if you listen hard:

Say you don’t know me, or recognize my face.
Say you don’t care who goes to that kind of place.

It’s not hard to read more into these lyrics, read a context, written at an intense time when the LA music business was dominated by white men; when, nationally, the National Cancer Institute had just announced the discovery of the retrovirus that causes AIDS. Intensity is in Mickey Thomas’s opening performance on the final song, the emphasis on “that kind of place.” He sounds like an outsider, as the listeners are too. We’re being pushed out, and the things we like are considered wrong.
In that respect, the song could be singing about itself, predicting its own future.
Vocalist and stalwart “We Built This City” defender Thomas said in GQ: “Anybody who says the lyrics are dumb hasn't taken the time to digest the verses. I don't think there's anything dumb about ‘looking for America, crawling through your schools.’”
Lyricist Taupin wanted to branch away from being known just as Elton John’s longtime collaborator, and the demo of the song by Martin Page is certainly a departure. Page referred to the song in its original form as “almost like a rebellion,” which Thomas echoed, in an email published on Ultimate Classic Rock: “I felt it was a protest song, but not really in an angry sense … It impressed me more as a feeling of lost innocence.”
Perhaps it will help to know that Taupin, who described the song as “very dark,” wrote it at the same time as the earnest and pleading These Dreams, recorded by Heart (“Every second of the night I live another life”).
My partner said Page’s demo of “We Built This City” sounds like a My Chemical Romance song. Moody, slower, it seems years before its time:

But the time was the 80s—and soon the simple song with a beautiful melody was padded with synthesizers, an elaborate production which now seems like early CGI dinosaurs. Add in an overproduced music video, further diluting and confusing the message. As Starship guitarist Craig Chaquico put it: “The song says we built this city on live music, let's bring it back—but the music is computerized. It complains about techno pop, but it's a techno-pop song. It exemplifies the problem it's protesting.”
The song was muddled again in the addition and perennial misunderstanding of its lyrics, the most outrageous of which is: “Well if you got the toco.” (taco? what??)
The lyric is actually: “Police have got the chokehold.” This corresponded to a sample of audio in the middle of the song, which in the demo was a taped recording of police responding to a protest. In final production, that police chatter was switched out, replaced with a sample of MTV executive Les Garland talking about traffic and the weather.
OK.
“Marconi plays the mamba” is the most hotly debated (hated?) lyric. Taupin downplayed it. In a 2020 Los Angeles Times interview, when asked if the lyric had a point, he said: “None whatsoever!” But Guglielmo Marconi was the inventor of the radio, and many believe “mamba” was supposed to be “mambo”—a slip of the tongue that stuck. Radio rhymes with mambo, after all.
There’s a little too much distancing going on here. Is the song so bad—or is it the production? Is it the erasure of the song’s intent, all this pandering and watering down, and the addition of overblown 80s sound, making “We Built This City” possibly the finest example of art by committee?
What happens when a bunch of executives get ahold of something in which they glimpse a kernel of truth? Well, they disguise it, of course. You walk back on something you know is real because you’re afraid.
Is the worst song of all time really the best?
In the GQ article, a member of a unnamed “successful 80s band” who rejected the song when it was brought to them by a producer, called it “the most pussy thing I've ever heard.”
We’re uncomfortable with the earnestness of “We Built This City.” From the beginning, it was angry and sad at the same time. But it was also loved, even with its 80s overdrive. And that is the thing that still surprises me about it now: the rush to deny we ever loved it.
But we did. We did love it. We still do.
Page said: “‘We Built This City’ is like Mickey Mouse. People want to knock it and they want to love it.” It makes sense that the song was used in a British commercial featuring a little girl riding her bike with training wheels, kitten in the bike basket. The child is lip-syncing the song, dreaming big dreams: that her kitten is singing. That she is a rock star, the headlamps of a neighbor’s car: spotlights; the sprinklers coming on: stadium fireworks. When he saw the commercial, Page said: “I nearly cried.”

It’s a big dream song: hopeful, defiant, and naïve. It’s pure, even in its ridiculousness, or more so because of it.
“We Built This City” is a love letter you send to your crush and then pretend it was a joke when they hesitate. “We Built This City” is the time-consuming meal you don’t season at the last minute or you season too much, with everything you have. And in doing so, you appeal to no one. “We Built This City” really wants you to like it. “We Built This City” is trying its best. “We Built This City” would hate this competition.
“We Built This City” is overcorrection. It’s Tori Amos in Y Kant Tori Read. It’s me bleaching my black hair. The McMansion of music, constructed over a simple but solid farm where in the summer, my family grew strawberries. In the winter, Christmas trees.
I was five or six when I first heard the song, coming through the radio on my school bus. Shuttling through the dark fields one winter morning, all the kids stopped what they were doing—teasing each other, copying homework—and began to sing. The school bus of children sang the whole song. When it was done, the driver said: Well, I like it better when you sing than when you talk.
I’d never had that kind of communal art experience before. Or really, since. But it’s an experience that happens a lot with “We Built This City.” It’s a stadium song, a song that can get a crowd on their feet, singing or screaming with just one line—so much so that sound engineers at major sporting events frequently play just the first line, then PAUSE.
We built this city.
It’s enough. The crowds know. Everyone knows what the song is, everyone has feelings about it, mostly tinged with nostalgia for a time they may or may not have lived through. But they want it back. They want the simplicity and the belonging. Producer Peter Wolf added that legendary chorus at the beginning, cementing the once-dark song’s reputation as catchy, bouncy enough for stadiums, for my school bus.
But the strength of the song is not the chorus. It’s the mamba/mambo line. It’s the one that follows, the imploring “Listen to the radio. Don’t you remember.” “We Built This City” wants you to remember what things were like before the rich people moved in, before our grandparents lost their houses, or the schools closed, or the clubs closed.
You live in the high rise, but we built this city.
You collect the rent checks, but we built this city.
You have the fancy job, but we built this city.
You gatekeep art and culture, but we built this city.
You razed my family land, but we built this city.
We all need something to believe in, to hold onto, even in a world that wants us gone, even as it tries to erase us.
Listen. Listen hard. Don’t you remember?

Alison Stine’s novel Road Out of Winter will be published by MIRA in September. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Kenyon Review. She writes at The Village Witch.   

Sometimes Love is An Owl in the Dark. Sometimes Love Has Feathered Hair: abby hagler On “Real Love”

When I was assigned to write about The Doobie Brothers’ yacht rock single “Real Love,” I was on OkCupid. Specifically, I was in the process of posting my profile. Having set no preferences—no location, no orientation or maximum age, no gender—I focused on a description of myself that would be appealing only to my best match. In the past, I learned it is essential to write frankly about what I’m looking for at the moment—a quality I noticed “Real Love” shares with a dating profile.
A few years ago, I made the mistake of joking in the Looking For section that someone had stolen my bike. The result was far too many messages from people wanting to sell me a bike and no one really wanting to go out. It became clear that OkCupid is a search engine of desire. Unfortunately, it is an information pool guaranteeing wish fulfillment though the result is almost never what you asked for. For this reason, I figured OkCupid would be a fine enough place to start research on this song.
When I asked an app-recommended potential match—J, 29—what he thought of “Real Love,” he listened to it twice and replied: “It reminds me of a girl I met in Vegas 2 years back. We spent just 2 nights together but it was really passionate and [a] connection I never felt before or again.” While “Real Love” does not conjure any Before Sunrise kinds of experiences for me, I agree it certainly pines. It crushes on the bygone, reminding me that heartbroken people have their own belief in time travel. To find a way to change the events that have passed is the one method of gaining a happier future.
There is no interview that says why Michael McDonald wrote this earnest sex request for “just one minute of real love.” The woman in the song seems to have a love life a lot like an online dater. She’s reaching out, misstepping, “chalking up the hurts.” Time doesn’t change the trial-and-error involved in finding a relationship. It’s an education many can empathize with, including this soft rock band of anywhere from five to seven hirsute men.

Maybe the woman in the song doesn’t know what she’s looking for. She is clearly not into the speaker, who hopes she can “lie just a little” and pretend to have feelings for him again. I get this. I’ve finally lived through enough clichés that this scenario makes sense. Dating is hard. Moving forward is nearly impossible when you question if what you want is good. Asking for what you truly want is always difficult. To speak desire risks the embarrassment of rejection, of being wrong. Looking at “Real Love” with dater’s sympathy, I have to wonder: Is baldly asking for a one-night stand with an ex enough to make the whole song bad?  
We all have memories attached to music. Yacht rock conjures a very specific past for me. Most sources place this music’s popularity from 1974 to 1984. In these years, my parents—who love The Doobies—dated, graduated high school, got married, and had us kids. They were figuring out themselves as sudden adults, as parents, as graduates of tech schools, as newlyweds. And after, Kenny Loggins, Ambrosia, and Robbie Dupree set the backdrop for my earliest examples of what love looks like. 
I say yacht rock for a reason. The term indicates a very specific slice of soft rock-adult contemporary. The new title also changes the way I feel about this music. It’s like a barrier of childhood distaste is removed if I can laugh at the exact music that used to make me count phone poles for entertainment. Today, I can finally see this entire subgenre for what it is: A big group of dudes who all just wanted to play their favorite R&B bass lines and say nice things about their lovers.
In my estimation, at least two generations of kids memorized these unabashedly sentimental songs by way of ambient absorption. It happened to me primarily in cars. Toto’s keyboard solos replaced conversation between my dad and me in the semi-trailer he drove to hustle extra cash. Steely Dan plucked a beat on the Sundays I was allowed to eat communion bread my mom made because, she said, it wasn’t holy after church was over. Hall and Oates played softly on the way to the grocery store, then dominated the Muzak station inside.
Yacht rock reminds me of when my parents hunched over the dinner table figuring out the check book. Biting the bullet on a farm business. Debating George Bush while I gorged on unholy bread. It reminds me of never mentioning to my mom that my dad said he didn’t remember how they met. Or, of never telling my dad when my mom cried at the grocery store because the bill was too high. Inevitably, I begin to think about entering a dark house after school, no one home. I think about finding my dad watching the late news by himself, my mom asleep in a separate room.

My parents divorced when I was 23, giving me two histories: The time when they were so in love and the time when they were not. Perhaps their marriage is just a plot arc that reached an early denouement, but it feels important to hold each period as distinct. To my dating profile, I brought my two truths: Love is real and it can end. Between those two points, a lot unfolds. This is what I’m looking for—everything in between.
I think the essence of yacht rock exists in between those two truths as well. After listening to several playlists consisting of nearly seven hours of the essentials, it’s clear that yacht rock lyrics mostly fall either to the side of a chill guy yearning for an ex or a chill guy realizing he’s in love enough to want to go on vacation together. The end of love or its spark, set to a nice beat, are oddly similar experiences in these songs. 
“Real Love” was released in 1980, a high point for yacht rock’s popularity. It reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and is The Doobies’ third most popular song. It is also the best song on the album One Step Closer, which is full of straight-to-canned-music jams. The title song “One Step Closer” has that wholesome saxophone and keyboard combination popular on 1980s sitcoms. I recognized track four, “Thank You Love,” from being on hold with an airline. This song is about a guy who gets in a relationship and his ecstasy inspires a xylophone solo. Listening to it is like reaching Paradiso in The Divine Comedy only to find that heaven is the most boring part.
One Step Closer actually reads like the epic journey of a guy determined to find love on a Princess cruise. The B side of “Real Love” is “Keep This Train A-Rollin’”—a song with a piano riff that quite possibly inspired the first bars of the Family Matters theme. McDonald’s train tune adopts a slower version of the drum beat from The Doobie’s 1973 punchy, bluesy, harmonica-laden hit “Long Train Runnin’”. One Step Closer all together gives the eerie feeling that you’ve heard all these songs before—maybe on a VHS tape in a classroom, maybe on a TV show with a caring dad, maybe amid the guffaws of school bus drivers in a bar that doesn’t exist anymore.
To even a casual listener, “Real Love” is peak yacht rock. “This song has audible beard,” noted OkCupid user Javier, 30, who said this was his first time listening to anything by The Doobies. “It is the essence of dads,” I added, side-stepping into a quick tangent about what our dads’ mustaches looked like in the 1980s. It was written by the very beardy Michael McDonald, king of at least half a dozen singles designed to make you want to unbutton your cabana shirt and let your chest hair breathe. In fact, Wikipedia listed yacht rock as a genre on McDonald’s page—a nice tip of the captain’s hat to him.

Time-wise, yacht rock’s smooth tunes appeared in contrast to bigger names like Queen, Journey, and Styx. Those bands are the “arena rock” rejected by the creators of the YouTube series Yacht Rock, who coined the more nautical term in 2005. “We liked the idea of these bands playing Marina Rock,” they told Rolling Stone, recalling how they all turned thirty and felt it was finally time to relax to Steely Dan like their own fathers before.
“Real Love,” is peak yacht rock but this does not automatically make it good. After all, Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” is peak too, but it is a long, hollow four-minute description of how fun it is to space out on a boat. Songs by these predominantly southern California bands don’t have to take place at sea but they do have to have a bass beat rhythmic as a strong undertow, silky keyboard, high-alto male harmonizing, and thick sentimentality.
     Qualities of a Michael McDonald gem are a slowed-down funk beat overlayed with a keyboard plinking like a happy slot machine. The core of any yacht rock song is overarching sunshine sustained by a combination of persistent piano and vocal melodies. Yacht rock is perfect for the end credits of any 1980s movie with either a plot about dramatic relationships or tropical resort shenanigans. The goal is to sound the exact way a piña colada feels melting into a truly primo sunset.
Written on the heels of the chart-topping success of The Doobies’ most popular song “What a Fool Believes,” you could say “Real Love” is a poor man’s version of it. Loneliness prevails in the lyrics of each, but narrative perspective controls how much sad sack energy bleeds into the composition of the song. Both have the same rhythm and key. The bass and keyboard in “Real Love” feels a little more mechanical. The notes are lower and more staccato, making this potential romantic tune feel a shade darker. McDonald also sings without accompaniment in “Real Love.” He doesn’t even harmonize with himself, which seems extra lonely. Part of the power of “What a Fool Believes” is the choir of dudes backing him.

Lyrically, “What a Fool” starts off with a cheerful confluence of vocals, keyboard, and beat, stating comfortably from a third person view:

He came from somewhere back in her long ago.
The sentimental fool don’t see.
Tryin’ hard to recreate what has yet to be created once in her life.
She musters a smile for his nostalgic tale.

On the other hand, “Real Love” begins with:

Darling, I know I’m just another head on your pillow.
If only just tonight, girl, let me hear you lie just a little.
Tell me I’m the only man that you ever really loved.
Honey, take me back deep in my memory
back when it was all very right, so very nice.

This feels like the internal monologue the guy “Fool” observes, the one who will not see that the lady he’s digging does not reciprocate. Neither song assumes what the woman feels. Instead, the narration gives away her feelings via cues the hero of the story willfully misses. With the context of the internal monologue, it’s reasonable to understand why “What a Fool Believes” would be more upbeat. It’s easier be in a good mood when the pain isn’t yours.
A yacht rock narrator is never aggressive. In this male-dominated genre, he is not the guy who weighs his masculinity against getting laid. He does not take rejection as an indication of the quality of women’s characters. Coming from a space of anger would be the opposite of smooth. For McDonald and friends, being cool involves truly heartfelt expressions. Yacht rock creates space to let men cry, celebrate love, and remember fondly.
OkCupid user Mauricio, 58, summed up “Real Love” this way: “Along this journey in search of love we go through many experiences. Some good some bad, in the end we would trade it all in for a real love. After all don't we start all relationships with the hope of it turning into something real?”
Martin, 48, didn’t think this song is for guys only. It isn’t for online daters only. This song has something for anyone who wants a relationship. “The Doobie Brothers song is on point I think. To be in love is simple. To find it is difficult. We, the ones who search, tend to lose our dreams at times, lose the path in the middle of the night. Lost souls with no shelter but with hearts like oceans. Who let the stars guide us. Like owls over the landscape. Wings of silence til morning breaks.” I logged off after that, thinking about how often I fly silent through the dark. If anything, “Real Love” gives that effort an utterance, something to sing.  
The most common theme in yacht rock is missing a long-gone babe. “Real Love” brings nothing new to the table in this regard. Like many songs on One Step Closer, it seems to be a regurgitation of a song from the past. This is McDonald’s tendency. His most popular songs are musically similar and always about a guy who cannot move on. After “Real Love,” he released the very smooth “I Keep Forgettin’” in 1982. This is the song where the speaker repeats:

I keep forgettin’ we’re not in love anymore.
I keep forgettin’ things will never be the same again.
I keep forgettin’ though you made it so clear.
I keep forgettin’.

Out of this trio, “Real Love” is the one that offers the conclusion: “We live and you learn.” This is tidy, but it’s both a lazy solution and a lie even McDonald could not accept. Live and learn brushes aside everything that makes love worthwhile to a reader or anyone. “Real Love” doesn’t care.
And I don’t care either. A song can’t be totally bad if you recognize parts of yourself in there. Maybe that’s why people like bad songs. Maybe that’s why people love wrong people. Badness, like love and pretty much anything else, is double-edged. Because “Real Love” exists, I am reminded that it is important to say what I need. To speak sets desire in motion, even if that desire is to hook up once or twice, to breathe against the softness of someone’s neck through a difficult decade, or to hold hands every afternoon and watch the clock run out. Real love asks for vulnerability we cannot expect. Sometimes that ask sounds like an old song in playing in the grocery store. Sometimes it has feathered hair.

Abby Hagler listens to yacht rock a lot in Chicago. Her work appears in FANZINE, Entropy, Horse Less Press, Deluge, Gramma Daily, and elsewhere. With Julia Cohen, she runs an interview series at Tarpaulin Sky. If you have an upcoming book or chapbook, please feel free to get in touch. DM on Twitter @killrbreeze