round 2
(1) starship, “we built this city”
demolished
(8) PHIL COLLINS, “ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE”
167-116
and will play in the sweet 16
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 11.
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.
JACKET REQUIRED: ELISA GABBERT ON “ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE” & PHIL COLLINS’ YUPPIE ROCK
An aspect of research I do not enjoy is finding out that everything I thought I knew about a subject was wrong. For years I have carried a belief in my head that the term “yacht rock” derives from the cover of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s 1977 album CSN, which features a photograph of David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash—in that order, no less—chillaxing on a sailboat. If I can believe the internet, this isn’t the case—the term did not exist until 2005 and was coined by J. D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Stair, and Lane Farnham, the creators of a mockumentary web series about the musical genre which was known in its own time, the late 1970s and early 80s, as “the West Coast Sound” or “adult-oriented rock.” According to these fellows, mockumentarists turned podcasters, and their acolytes, yacht rock—a derogatory category that, like “dad jokes,” we’ve decided to embrace, because liking things we used to mock is bizarrely exhilarating—is not an umbrella term for any song “about a boat, or the ocean, or sailing.” Timothy Malcolm, a food editor with strong feelings on this topic, writes that yacht rock “can be characterized as smooth and melodic, and typically combines elements of jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock,” with “very little acoustic guitar” but lots of “Fender Rhodes electric piano.” The “folkie songs” of Crosby, Stills & Nash, he adds, decidedly do not qualify.
This bums me out, because when I choose a Yacht Rock station on a streaming music service, the first song I want to hear is never the inevitable first song, “Sailing” by Christopher Cross, one of the available options in this tournament of badness. What I want to hear is “Southern Cross” by Crosby, Stills & Nash. There’s a video on YouTube, which I’ve watched dozens of times, of the trio playing this song live at a concert in 1982. It was still pretty much their heyday—the album they were touring, Daylight Again, went platinum—but what I love about the video is that they already look washed up. I am inordinately fond of these dorks in their various stages of balding, overweight, and just unfashionable. Despite the acoustic guitars, the song displays many defining aspects of yacht rock: It’s “bubbly” and melodic, “yet oddly complex and intellectual” to use Malcolm’s words. The yacht has to bear a lot of metaphorical weight: “So I’m sailing for tomorrow, my dreams are a dyin’ / And my love is an anchor tied to you, tied with a silver chain / I have my ship and all her flags are a flyin’ / She is all I have left and music is her name.” Stills wrote the lyrics, he explained in the liner notes to the CSN box set, “about a long boat trip I took after my divorce … it’s about using the power of the universe to heal your wounds.” The themes of “reassuring vague escapism” and “heartbroken, foolish men,” sailing away from their problems, are also key features of the genre—the first episode of Yacht Rock is about the writing of the song “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers.
There’s a scene in the 1984 action/romance movie Romancing the Stone where Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner take shelter in a wrecked cargo plane in the jungles of Colombia. The plane was transporting weed, a kilo of which he proceeds to throw into the campfire. Stoned, they get to chatting, while the Douglas character (“Jack T. Colton”) idly flips through an old issue of Rolling Stone he finds in the plane. He sits up and cries out, “Aw, goddamn it man, the Doobie Brothers broke up.” (I found this line hilarious as a child, though I could not possibly have understood almost anything about it—who the Doobie Brothers were, when they broke up, what “doobie” means or the effects of marijuana—I think we must appreciate the formal properties of jokes before we understand their content.) I bring this up because the movie ends with Jack buying a boat—paid for by selling the giant emerald that was eaten by an alligator they had confronted in Cartagena—so they can literally sail away together. The fantasy of boat life was fundamental to the yuppie dreams of the 80s, and at least as important as the fantasy of sailing itself was the fantasy of being able to afford a boat.
Yacht rock, at its tail end, aged into yuppie rock, alternatively known in my own mind as suit rock: think Huey Lewis, Robert Palmer, and of course Phil Collins. In the early days of Genesis, he was post-hippie prog rock, photographed in fleece-lined jackets or shirtless and in cutoffs, with long hair and a surprisingly lush beard, but at the time of my first exposure to Collins, when I was beginning to form memories and an identity, around ’84/’85, he was always in a suit. He wears a suit—an abstract-print jacket over a white shirt, fully buttoned but without a tie—in the video for “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),” my sentimental favorite Phil Collins song. In his memoir, Not Dead Yet, he says he wrote most of the song back in 1979, around the same time as “In the Air Tonight,” but he didn’t finish it until the director Taylor Hackford asked him for a song for the soundtrack to his 1984 movie Against All Odds (which is kind of a good movie, worth watching if for no other reason than seeing Jeff Bridges at peak hotness—he plays an ex-pro football player). He wears a suit—a double-breasted tan suit, with a yellow tie—in the video for “Easy Lover,” his duet with Philip Bailey from Earth, Wind & Fire, a song that in the past few years has begun to follow me everywhere; I seem to hear it on car radios or over the PA system in grocery stores about a once a week. (I’m not complaining.) He wears a suit—gray, double-breasted, yellow tie, white sneakers—in the video for “Sussudio,” a nonsense word that Collins says came “out of nowhere.” “I can’t think of a better word that scans as well as ‘sussudio,’ so I keep it and work around it,” he says in his (ghost-written) memoir. This makes no sense at all, since what he actually sings is “susussudio,” with an extra syllable. “If I could have a pound for every time I’ve been asked what the word means,” Collins says, “I’d have a lot of pounds” (doesn’t he?). (The whole memoir, for some reason, is written in the present tense, so you get sentences like, “Things are bad at home—his wife Jill is having a difficult pregnancy, which is not something I’m aware of at the time.”) He’s wearing a suit in the video for “One More Night”—the video is black & white, so it’s hard to say exactly what color the suit is, but even in grayscale it looks like his signature yellow tie. He’s wearing a suit in the video for “Two Hearts”—actually several different suits, since he plays every player in his band in the video. He wears a suit—gray sleeves pushed up to the elbow—in a Michelob commercial from 1986 that is almost a video for the Genesis song “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight.” This commercial, a montage of concert footage and steamy yuppie nightlife in what I took to be downtown Manhattan, informed my whole idea of adulthood. (I never noticed, but apparently the song is actually about drug addiction, so using it to sell beer is kind of like playing “Pink Houses” at the Republican National Convention.)
I honestly love this era of Phil Collins. George Bradt, a research analyst at MTV from 1983 to 1988, has said, “The best ‘testing’ artist of all was probably Phil Collins. Research showed that viewers never got tired of his videos, so they were played regularly, months or even years after they were hits.” He was writing and recording both with Genesis and as a solo artist, doing production work or drumming for people like Eric Clapton and Robert Plant (whom he calls “Planty”), and appearing on benefit singles like “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and in benefit concerts like Live Aid. He was ubiquitous, and now he has a kind of sheepish defensiveness about his success, like Could I help it if I couldn’t stop writing gold hits? At one point in Not Dead Yet, he says that No Jacket Required sold 25 million copies—“I only know this because I looked it up on Wikipedia”! “In the eye of the tornado” he couldn’t be bothered to keep up with his sales. It was a baffling choice for the name of his ’85 album, considering his penchant for jackets. The story is that he and Planty were trying to get a drink at a hotel bar in Chicago, but they wouldn’t let him in without a jacket. “I am wearing a jacket,” Collins said. “A proper jacket, sir … Not leather,” the bar man replied. “I’ve always hated stuffiness and snobbery,” Collins writes, “so No Jacket Required becomes my album title and, yes, why not, ethos.” Collins’ album titles are uniquely terrible—why so many ellipses? He titled his first hits album …Hits.
Phil Collins’ discography fascinates me because his good songs are so good and his bad songs are so bad. I truly hate “A Groovy Kind of Love,” a cover song from 1988—it is unlistenably bad, much more offensive than the original version, recorded by The Mindbenders, a beat rock group, in 1965. Collins slows it down to the syrupy tempo of a music box lullaby. “Another Day in Paradise” is down at the bottom with it. From his 1989 album …But Seriously, the single was a No. 1 hit and won a Grammy for Record of the Year. It’s odd because, and I guess this could be true for every song in the tournament, I think of it as a song that everyone always despised. (It stands to reason that the more popular something is, the more well-known it is, the more people have the opportunity to hate it: the Eagles Greatest Hits effect.) I remember reading an article in Sassy magazine in the early 90s in which a male, possibly British staffer made fun of Collins’ worrying over the homeless problem, writing something very close to, “Maybe it’s because you have all the money, ya bald bastard.” Collins’ yuppie era had given us tracks like “Take Me Home,” one of the good ones, a song that fits right in with the exhaustion porn power ballads of hair metal (see Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” or Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home”). “I’ve been a prisoner all my life,” Collins sings, which makes me think of Lady Gaga recently tweeting, “Fame is prison.” The video shows him traveling the world—lip syncing in front of international destinations from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House to the Hollywood sign. But the 80s were almost over, and people were starting to tire of yuppie excess. Some of them, at least, were also starting to tire of Phil Collins. His management supposedly called MTV and asked them to play his videos less.
“I’m loath to use the dreaded eighties phrase ‘conscience rock,’” Collins says, but he wasn’t so loath to write conscience rock. He got the idea for “Another Day in Paradise” during the tour for Invisible Touch. When the band landed in D.C., Collins asked their driver about “the cardboard boxes lined along the pavements in the shadow of the Capitol Building.” He was “gobsmacked” to learn they were “the homes of the homeless”—“so many of them, so close to all this wealth and power.” Dude, one can’t help but think. The song was seen as exploitative by many, just clueless and cringey by others. I’m not entirely sure why the Genesis song “Land of Confusion,” which also has a “message,” feels less cheesy and detestable—maybe because it’s more upbeat, with a sort of funny video (featuring life-size puppets of Ronald and Nancy Raegan). Its politics are also vaguer, a general less-war, more-peace vibe: “There’s too many men, too many people / Making too many problems / And not much love to go round.” It’s a reminder for the youth that good politics are much more aligned with age cohorts than generations. Mike Rutherford, who wrote the lyrics, was born in 1950. “My generation will put it right,” Collins sings, “We’re not just making promises that we know we’ll never keep.” (OK, boomers.) The video is going for laughs, though—it ends with the Ronald puppet trying to call for his nurse and accidentally hitting the “Nuke” button instead.
“Another Day in Paradise” is comparatively maudlin, maudlin by any standards really. It takes itself utterly seriously. The video begins with a shot of Earth from space, a version of the “Blue Marble” image that famously inspired the environmental movement. (Many astronauts claim that seeing our planet from space completely changed their perspective on global relations, a phenomenon known as the “overview effect.”) As we zoom into Earth, the color goes sepia tone: instant melancholy. In between clips of Collins singing with a highly furrowed brow, we see a bunch of still shots of homeless people sleeping in the street, a few stats about homelessness in all-caps text (“3 MILLION HOMELESS IN AMERICA”) as if in a PowerPoint presentation. Some of these images are really harrowing—a shirtless child lying on newspaper, a flap of cardboard over his head. Watching the video again as I write this, for the first time in many years, I don’t know quite how to feel about it. Because I am that bitch, of course I think of Sontag, who writes in Regarding the Pain of Others that for “antiwar polemicists,” “war is generic” and images of war “are of anonymous, generic victims.” As such a photo of a child killed in wartime might be used toward any end, to justify any position: “Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.” You can look at all painful images as manipulative, in this light. In Collins’ case, a slideshow of the homeless is being used to sell records. He did donate a bunch of money to homeless shelters during this time, though—his intentions weren’t terrible. I think I hate the song in part because I can’t entirely hate it; my distaste is too close to ambivalence. The piano part is undeniably catchy. It’s a song I might catch myself humming along to before, with a jolt, I remember I don’t like it and change the station.
Collins’ appeals for sympathy in Not Dead Yet read as kind of pathetic, and he knows it. In a passage about his former bandmate Peter Gabriel (Gabriel left Genesis in 1975), Collins writes:
I do envy Pete. There are some songs he’s written that I wish I’d written—for one thing “Don’t Give Up,” his gorgeous duet with Kate Bush. But even here at the height of my success it seems that, for every achievement or great opportunity that comes my way, I’m starting to accrue bad press as a matter of course. Pete seems to get good press seemingly equally automatically. It seems a bit unfair, which I appreciate is a pathetic word to use in this context. A few years later, in 1996, when I release Dance into the Light, Entertainment Weekly will write: “Even Phil Collins must know that we all grew weary of Phil Collins.”
For Phil Collins to whinge about unfairness is of course absurd—but he kind of has a point. Critical attention and favor are whimsical; some great artists are recognized in their time, while others are not; otherwise Herman Melville wouldn’t have died in near poverty. This is not to say that Peter Gabriel isn’t good, just that it can always be counted as luck—coincidence, even—when good art is appreciated in kind. (I too wish I wrote “Don’t Give Up,” because then I’d get to be in the video, hugging Kate Bush for six and a half minutes straight.) Pathetic or not, Collins is a somewhat sympathetic figure, to me. In late life, as he tells it in the memoir’s penultimate chapter, he moved to Switzerland to be near two of his kids, though he had divorced their Swiss mother; he became a full-blown alcoholic out of sheer boredom. He eventually had to be put on Antabuse, which blocks the enzyme that allows your body to metabolize alcohol, so he could stop drinking and not die of pancreatitis. (Duff McKagan, the bassist from Guns N’ Roses, almost died this way too—after years of drinking ten bottles of wine a day, an effort to cut back after years of drinking gallons of vodka, his pancreas burst and gave him third-degree burns on his internal organs. In the ER, the morphine they gave him had next to no effect. He begged the doctors to kill him.)
Nothing Collins says in his book is especially insightful. (When I was reading it, or skimming it anyway, I saw a conversation on Twitter about who qualifies as a “writer’s writer.” I joked that Phil Collins is definitely not that, and at least four or five people replied that he is, however, a “drummer’s drummer.”) I’m just fond of him, the way I’m fond of fat David Crosby, who sang backing vocals on “Another Day in Paradise.” (They sang it together on the Arsenio Hall show! Collins wears a gray suit over a black shirt with an improbably large collar, almost forming its own bowtie; Crosby’s mustache, the ideal mustache, maybe the only mustache in history I like, and his mutton chops are nearing full gray.) I’m fond of Collins’ hairline, a deep male-pattern-baldness version of a widow’s peak, like the grandpa from The Munsters but fluffier. I’m fond of his corny dance moves, the little toe taps and bounces. And I’m fond of his wardrobe, the bucket hats and Hawaiian shirts, the pleated pants, the sweater vests over polos and, yes, the suits. They remind me of a brief time when it seemed cool to be an adult, and to do adult signifier things like work on Wall Street and have an accountant. I may not have yearned for a yacht per se, but I couldn’t wait to be old enough to wear shoulder pads and “pumps,” to go to a franchise fern bar and order something like an Irish coffee. Adulthood meant freedom of choice, and that, to me, was glamour—not sailing but the ability, the option to sail.
I was six or whatever, so I didn’t understand that by the time I was old enough to do those things, they wouldn’t be cool anymore. I experience this as an actual loss: I never got to have that alternate life as an adult in the 80s. Nostalgia is a kind of pain
Elisa Gabbert is a poet and essayist and the author of four collections: The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018), L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013), and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian Long Read, The London Review of Books, A Public Space, The Paris Review Daily, and many other venues. The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays is forthcoming in August 2020 from FSG Originals.