For some reason, this mention of Starship's "We Built This City" led me down a hole of Internet research on my own personal Mandala Effect rabbit hole. I remembered as a kid, the Residents - who I only knew at the time as a bunch of guys wearing eyeballs as their heads - being part of the video for "We Built This City". I later became a fan of the Residents, who hadn't mentioned this at all. No evidence of them appearing with Starship, including the video for "We Built this City". But I hadn't been able to shake this vision for decades. Did I imagine it?
Tonight, digging deeper, I found it! I found the source. In 1984, just a year before "We Built this City", Jefferson Starship (the progenitor of Starship, we won't mention the Airplane here) released a video for their ostensible hit single "Layin' it on the Line".
There they were! The Residents! In a terrible, terrible Jefferson Starship video! Sung by Grace Slick and, uh, that dude from Starship!
Strangely, I'll be able to sleep deeply tonight knowing that this mystery that was knawing at my soul for so many years has finally been solved.
I feel like I should be familiar with this song but I'm not, and I have to say, truly one of the great choruses of 80's rock: "we're layin' it on the line (layin' it on the line) ---just layin' it all, right on the line".
It's true. I knew a person who got stopped by customs on an international flight because they thought no person could conceivably have 12 cans of hair spray in their luggage for innocent purposes (she did- for creating the massive 80s hair).
The song was released in 1986, which is years before the Video Toaster and the LightWave 3D software were released. They might have used an Amiga 1000 for some of it.
No, it's named for Nelson Mandela. Because when he died people falsely thought they remembered him dying a couple of decades before. But they likely conflated his release from prison with his death.
While possible, it’s also entirely likely that he was mistaken.
And it’s a reasonable mistake, so that’s why I provided the context of the origin and didn’t try to shame him for not knowing.
I remember having my own rabbit hole with the Residents band.
In junior high I used to stay up late and watch Letterman. He used to have Chris Elliot the comedian on doing various bits. He had one that imitated the Residents where Chris and several other people dressed up in weird outfits called something like "Maumoshcantz" or something French sounding. Chris' costume had a big black box with three toilet rolls for the face on it and played bizarre, "avant-garde" music. When they finished, Chris came over to sit with Dave. Dave tried to announce the name of the band and Chris scolded him by over pronouncing the name. Then Dave asked what part Chris played and he exclaimed, "I played the guy with toilet rolls on his head Dave! Shesssh!"
I recounted the bit to a friend and he instantly said the whole bit was a tilt of the cap to the band The Residents and it poked fun at their outfits and members on purpose.
This lead me, pre-internet to start digging around to find out what I could about the band. A few weeks later there was some MTV News story about a musician who died that apparently was one of the members. They made light of the fact nobody knew this since the band had purposefully concealed their identities so they could rotate out people as necessary and then say they just wanted people to focus on the music instead. Strangely enough, there was a similar story making the rounds on the internet about something similar that Slipknot was doing and Corey Taylor even used the same reason they wear masks - so fans can focus more in the music! This of course, brought back memories in my own research that eventually concluded with an older brother of a friend who was into really weird stuff and gave me a somewhat sordid history of the The Residents, and some the eerie connections to their management team Cryptic Corporation. He even pulled out several albums saying there's a possibility The Beatles WERE the Residents and showed me the two albums "Meet the Residents" and "Meet the Beatles" album as proof. Keep in mind, I was like 10, my buddies brother was like 16; so imagine how that conversation went down.
Anyways, thanks for bringing this up, it was really fun remembering my own rabbit hole with that band. Which interestingly enough, started with a David Letterman bit and ended with similar rumors swirling around Slipknot.
The Letterman bit must have been parodying Mummenschanz, an avant-garde Swiss theater group that was pretty popular (as those things go) at the time. They do feel a bit in the same corner of the arts universe as the Residents...
The idea of a worst song of all time is silly, but I want to use this as an excuse to juxtapose We Built this City with another Starship hit: Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now. The latter is just as fluffy and corny, but instead of generic corporate rock it's a soaring silly power ballad duet.
I think the secret sauce is Diane Warren. It's the same reason I love belting out I Don't Want to Miss a Thing at karaoke, or listening to If I Could Turn Back Time on a loop while working.
This post has been sponsored by the Committee to Get Diane Warren into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (CGDWRRHF).
The idea that "We Built This City" is somehow worse than all the garbage pop music hits that have come out in the past 20 years is absurd. Sure, "We Built This City" is pretty cheesy, and certainly not the best example of 80s rock, but at least it's listenable, unlike the overly-compressed and Autotuned crap that modern pop is.
I agree that a "worst song of all time" is a bit silly, but if someone was trying to make the worst song of all time that would still get regular radio play and you asked me for ideas, "put a traffic report in the middle of the song" would be pretty high on my ideas list.
I say that with love as I absolutely love the We Built This City (and Starship for that matter)
I know your description includes "still get regular radio play", but one of my favourite pieces of troll music is "The Most Unwanted Song". They surveyed people to find the things they liked least in music and put it all together. I don't want to spoil just how creatively awful it is or what's in there, so I'll just drop the link and go.
Personally I find The Most Wanted Song rather bland, though. Whereas the Most Unwanted Song has some genuinely annoying bits, but other bits are quite listenable and interesting, so all in all I much prefer it over the "Wanted" song.
I mean...c'mon..they could have at least picked a "worst song of all time" that wasn't a Billboard Top 100 #1 hit. Ditto for "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"...
The same one that hates Nickelback (they're not great, but terrible?, nah), clowns ("eek, let's collectively decide to feign fear at the humorously funny looking people with big shoes at the circus, even without having read "It"!"), and "moist" (who wants an arid cupcake?).
Haha these internet fads are great. Especially when you hang out with people who aren’t chronically online.
There was also the bit about gauges and hipsters (which just became the most mainstream). Then there was the fedora hate which I think was the funniest because I knew about it (because I’m chronically online) and then one day I’m traveling through Japan with my friends and the girls are all like “you should try out these hats at this store” and it’s piece for piece exactly what Reddit would hate. But the girls loved it on the lads and I’m married to one now.
It’s like how here people are always like “oh I’d never give X a buck they’re stealing all your data” and then out in the real world people love Google, like adore it. What’s the deal with that?
One of my coworkers stated this a few years ago: "i'm on an interesting musical journey right now: trying to identify musicians/groups/bands/artists, etc. that i've over looked because they were "mainstream" popular"
And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.
I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
> I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
I feel like that's often part of it. Something that represents peak (whatever) in terms of a sound. The sort of highly-polished result that almost sounds like it was AI-generated by a model trained on exactly what was popular over the past few years.
Of course, you don't need AI to do it - just slightly more human and manual analysis of trends, sales, marketing, and production techniques.
I unironically love the band Winger. They’re probably most famous now for becoming instantly uncool once Mike Judge drew Stewart in a Winger tshirt on Beavis and Butthead in the 90s.
The thing is though, they’re amazing musicians. Kip Winger is premiering another one of his classical works with the Nashville Symphony in the next few weeks. Reb Beach is one of the most skilled and melodic guitar players to come out of the 80s. They wrote and continue to write some great songs too if you like that kind of music.
Music snobbery is just silly, and robs you of the joy of discovering some great new music while simultaneously robbing others of it too. Everybody loses.
On a parallel track, I've been continually amazed at how even as someone interested in broad musical categories, how many bands I've never heard of who were 'mainstream' popular in some way - maybe not top 40 radio but at least on some radio somewhere, or were #1 at some point in some not completely niche genre. there's just so much music out there, even so much good music.
I remember REM self-nominating 'Shiny Happy People ' as the worst song. And even though it was one of their most successful songs in the charts they refused to play it live.
Denis Leary: I want you to pull this bus over on the side of the Pretentiousness Turnpike! I want the shiny people over here, and the happy people over here.
I think you're missing the point. WBtC is a "bad" song in exactly the same way that Swift's songs are "bad". It's unashamedly pop, aimed at tastes that sophisticated listeners try to escape, and critically: is so good that those sophisticated listeners find themselves listening to it anyway.
It's basically a bouncing, bopping reminder that we aren't as smart as we think we are.
Yeah, if you're looking at it from a composition/music theory angle, it's not your typical 4 chord pop song. There are thirds in the bass all over place that provide interesting contrary motion to the chords, and the verse and chorus are technically in different keys. It's not genius writing but it's definitely not lazy.
As the father of a middle schooler I was recently forced to listen to a lot of Taylor Swift. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that she's enormously talented, even if I don't like her pop era or public personality. (And my daughter has moved past it, mostly because of the personality thing. I'm proud.)
I had forgotten just how much I hated that inescapable song in the 80s. Definitely close to my worst song ever. There's plenty of 80s pop that I've softened my views on as I got older and even started to grudgingly appreciate, but not "we built this city".
I don't think I'd even recognize a single Taylor Swift song. I plan to keep it that way, currently she's just a name and a face to me, knowing her music would probably only cause me to dislike her unfairly.
Eh. Swift isn't my cup of tea; you're much more likely to find me at an industrial metal show. However, she's crazy talented, and her music is well-produced and wildly catchy. She's really good at what she does.
Along those lines, I'd never pay to see Britney Spears perform, but "Toxic" goes hard.
Their music shouldn't make you dislike them. It's not objectively awful, not by a long shot. If anything, just acknowledge we're not the target audience and move on.
I too try to avoid falling into the all-too-typical trope of reflexively hating on what's broadly popular just because it's popular. While I'm also not a big fan of Swift's music, I agree it's consistently very well executed. I also think she deserves genuine respect for remaining both artistically and financially successful for well over a decade without imploding like so many pop stars seem to. I suspect this requires both intelligence and strength of character.
Yeah I know. Because I just don't like pop music, and having understood she's got a reputation as really talented, actually hearing her music only risks downgrading my impression of her. I'm fine with being out of touch/irrelevant.
My kids (and their friends too) don't listen to current music either, so I don't get much exposure to it.
I'm a metalhead and never been much of a Taylor Swift fan, but important people in my life have been for the last almost 20 years so I know a decent amount about it.
I think her earlier music really demonstrates her talent. Well. Again, it's not my favorite, but it is genuinely really well written, creative, and well performed. Her newer stuff after she switched to more of a pop sound, I have a very hard time finding the talent. If I didn't know some of her work already from the earlier days, I would absolutely not recognize the talent even if it sits there in a latent form.
Most of the comments here are going to predictably call out that "We Built This City" is not the worst song of all time and offer up an example that's ostensibly worse.
But I think a very important caveat missing from the article and all of the comments here is that Blender/VH1 never said it was the worse song of all time. They said it was the most "awesomely bad" song of all time. To which I 100% agree with. Its not worst songs, its good catchy songs that are also objectively bad. And I think "awesomely bad" is just a great way to title it. We can all agree "We Built This City" is a catchy ear worm you can rock out to in the car, it lifts my spirits whenever it gets played. It stands on the pantheon of terrible but awesome hits like "Ice Ice Baby", "She Bangs", and the Ghostbusters theme song.
Nobody is saying you shouldn't listen to "We Built This City". Its a guilty pleasure. Crank that mother up on your car ride home alone and rock the fuck out.
It's a brilliant song for this reason: Read the lyrics to the song. It's a song about what they now call gentrifcation. The video and song are in the post-corporatized/gentified world where once true rock reigned. It's supposed to sound phony as hell.
Jordan Peele does a fantastic impersonation of Ray Parker Jr. (“the Ghostbusters guy”) promoting his lesser known movie theme songs he’s submitted through the years. Talk about bad songs! Jumanji, Passion of the Christ, Apt Pupil. lol. https://youtu.be/GxjNOv5QPzM?si=zSduoOlbIULoKOMC
There's a lot of weird revisionism when it comes to judging 1980s music (eg [1]). It actually feels like a lot of 90s kids just being haters. There's been analysis that you basically like whatever was popular when you were 14 [2].
Additionally, it seems like more modern music just isn't enduring [3] in the same way music from the 1950s to 1980s was. Just the fact that people today know about "We Built this City" nearly 40 years after it was released tells you something. I honestly think that unless you grow up in the 2000s you could go and play the music from 2000 to 2010 (as an example) and it would overall be much less recognizable than music from the 1960s and 1970s is.
Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time". It's recognizable. People know it. It has a vibe. Millenials who grew up on 90s grunge may see it differently but that doesn't really mean anything.
Modern music isn't as recognizable because there's way more of it, it's more varied, and doesn't get played a billion times over radio and MTV to a huge audience. The record industry isn't what it was at all, as detailed in your link. Jukeboxes with a selection of hits used to exist, now they're like spotify clients instead. I don't agree with you saying it's less enduring, though. That's a different thing. You shouldn't confuse popularity and number of plays for quality. For me there are some songs I'll hold on to a long time that I first heard in the last 10 years. There's still great music being made, IMO, but then pop from any era rarely was what I'd call good.
Speaking to that, the most played song on Spotify, ever, is "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd. Came out 5 years ago, and it's "okay"; funny enough, it triggers a lot of 80s nostalgia with its instrumentals. So, there's a data point for you to ponder.
What I find really interesting of late is YouTube Music suggesting sleeper hits to me, that were big 20-30 years ago, but somehow missed out on them. "Somewhere Only We Know" has been on rotation in some shopping venues & showed up on my playlist; it was a hit, 20 years ago, yet somehow missed out on it.
Really? I get annoyed because after 4 or 5 decent picks based on whatever song I start with, it inevitably shifts to the most well-known, overplayed singles by any related band.
> There's been analysis that you basically like whatever was popular when you were 14 [2].
I was clearly excluded from this analysis, seeing as how out of the entries in the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2006, I can see exactly three songs that I somewhat enjoy alongside dozens of songs that I hate with a passion. I'd sooner listen to "We Built This City" on repeat for 24 hours straight than listen any of the Top 10 of that year even once (with the sole exception of "Crazy").
I'd find that analysis to be more believable if it filtered by genres/subcultures a bit. I hung out with the metalheads when I was 14, so a lot of rock and metal artists/groups that were popular in 2006-ish - SoaD, Disturbed, Evanescence, Lacuna Coil, Mushroomhead, Nightwish, Dream Theater, Lacuna Coil, Dethklok, Blind Guardian, and the like - are the ones that stuck around at the top of my personal rankings.
> There's a lot of weird revisionism when it comes to judging 1980s music (eg [1]).
Disclaimer, I grew up in the 90s and became an adult around 9/11.
All 80s pop music is terrible with the exception of Thriller. There was an over reliance on cheesy synths and reverbed drum machines, (and cocaine) and almost none of it is redeemable 30 years later. To me, it all sounds dated and bad. If you grew up in the 80s it probably sounds good.
Pop producers and technology finally reached a point in the 90s where electronic synths and drum machines sound cohesive and more natural.
> Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time".
There may be other contenders, but if this song doesn't make the short list for you, I can't explain it. I doubt I could pay anyone to make such an outrageous claim.
It's not a counterargument at all. It's just someone who assumes that there is this great counterargument they haven't bothered to make while whining "there are other bad songs too". Your comment here indicates that you're just too young to have heard it every single day, twice a day, throughout your childhood as it inexplicably got constant airtime. The long ride to and from school on the schoolbus, my first experience with torture. At least on sundays you could turn Solid Gold off. This is like saying "Vietnam wasn't that bad" because you watched a war movie once.
> ... heard it every single day, twice a day, throughout your childhood
If it was so terrible, why did it get played so often?
When I think "terrible", I think of the movie "The Room", which has been called the Citizen Kane of bad movies. It is truly awful. The dialog is awful. The acting is awful. There are all sorts of logical inconsistencies where things inextricably appear and disappear. By any metric it's bad. It's so bad that it has a cult following because it's so bad.
"We Built This City" just isn't anything like that.
Compare it to My Humps [1] or What Does the Fox Say [2] or Friday, just to name a few? These are a few random songs that are all miles worse than We Built This City.
Your comment here indicates that you're just too young to have heard it every single day, twice a day, throughout your childhood as it inexplicably got constant airtime.
So your argument is basically just a no true Scotsman.
I grew up listening to it. I still enjoy it. I also still enjoy Rock Me Amadeus, and Kashagoogoo's Never Ending Story theme, too.
I was ten. How old were you? I ask because your recollection has strong "seething teen" energy.
I didn't know Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to this song. Man, that's gotta sting.
But if I was making a list of Awful, Terrible Songs, I'm not sure I would have even included this one, mostly because I wouldn't remember it existed. Maybe that's what makes it bad--it was in constant rotation in the 80s, but as soon as they stopped playing it regularly I just... forgot it existed.
Looking at various lists of "Worst Songs" always confuses me. A lot of them are just really popular songs that got overplayed. Wikipedia's page says the Spandau Ballet's "True" is one, which is just nuts.
Phil Collins and Sting both went from hard-rocking tunes to elevator music with very little warning. It’s hard to believe Sting went from The Police to the sublime Bring On The Night to Fields of Gold.
It's a consequentialist sort of "worst": (lack of) artistic quality multiplied by exposure and impact. Couple that with how hard aesthetic quality is to assess and you get some odd lists.
This song brings back good memories for me. Other songs from that era I remember are "Life in a Northern Town", "Walk Like an Egyptian", some Corey Hart songs.
Right there in the first paragraph: “At the time, Starship's most famous member, singer Grace Slick, was 46.”
Grace Slick was born in 1939, so she was among the oldest of her cohort already in the Sixties. She’s one of the strangest things about pop history for me, right up there with Debbie Harry being over thirty when Blondie hit it big, and Stuart Murdoch being accepted by Glasgow hipster circles well into his late 30s. Pop music is so youth-centered, and that youth audience has often been highly suspicious and deprecating of people much older than them, that it baffles me that these performers still flourished.
A lot of the leaders of the hippies were actually older than that generation, despite the classic "don't trust anyone over 30" and "hope I die before I get old" sentiments of the movement. For example, both Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (who founded the "Youth International Party" or yippies, which mutated into hippies) were born in the 1930s, a decade or more older than most hippies.
Aerosmith was about to call it quits, they did that duet with Run DMC and had another handful of platinum records afterward. Tyler was ~38 when Walk This Way charted the second time. Many of their greatest hits are from after they were old.
And then there was Tom Petty, who had hits in three decades. Practically David Bowie levels of staying power.
Dylan's gospel albums are classics. Documentaries have been made about how good they are. IIRC "Shot of Love" is one of Dylan's favorites of his own records.
Many fans rejected them at the time because of the culture shock of his religious pivot, but that reaction was about the content, not the music, and has long faded. Nowadays it's understood that the sudden-fan-alienation-move is a Dylan thing, just like when he went electric at Newport in the first place.
I'm not gonna argue that "Man gave names to all the animals" is one of Dylan's finest, but I'd be interested to know which specific tracks you think are terrible, because those records are full of great songs, and so are some of the outtakes.
If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
Admittedly, I’ve only listened to the supposedly-best one (Slow Train Coming, maybe? It’s been a while) and the supposedly-worst one (Saved?) of the three. The former got my toe tapping a couple times IIRC but was mostly forgettable—it was on its account that I allowed that as much as 20% of the three albums, together, might not qualify as very-bad. The latter was back-to-front a slog of a listen. The musical equivalent of contractor-beige painted walls with off-white trim. One of the dullest albums I’ve ever heard, and I owned some stinkers in my high school years.
I sometimes like religious music, so that aspect’s not a deal-breaker for me. One of my favorite local bands was kinda secretly a Christian rock band, they just veiled the references enough and shifted things more-poetic so they didn’t sound ultra cheesy from the very first line like that stuff usually does, and probably some listeners didn’t even notice (they didn’t bill themselves as Christian rock and played normal venues). I love the couple of very-Christian tracks on Springsteen’s Nebraska.
> If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
Sadly(?) that album-trilogy is the latest Dylan I’ve heard, so I can’t say whether it gets worse (but I’d believe it).
Whenever the topic of strikingly bad songs comes up, I always like to link to Spaced Out - The Best of Leonard Nimoy & William Shatner[1] which is an album truly breathtaking in its badness. Everyone I've ever played the CD for has agreed it's the best bad music they've ever heard.
Maybe not as strikingly bad, you ever heard Pat Boone's In A Metal Mood? [1] Someone stole my copy of that in high school... I suspect they had another thing coming.
The Muzak system at a retail job I worked played it all the time and we came to despise the song. It became a bit of a proto-Rickroll for those of us who worked there to trick others into hearing it. But the song became much more interesting once I learned about the urban legend connecting it to Mary Ellis. That the writer of the song says there's no connection just makes it that much more enticing.
What are you... Total Eclipse of the Heart is all in power. Were you alive when it was playing on radio all the time? Being played too much doesn't make it bad.
That's a superficial gloss over an even deeper and weirder back story behind the filthiest song ever scrawled on a napkin: https://youtu.be/LGqYnj_Y3CI?t=73
As a self-identified metalhead who hated 80's pop in the 80's, I have to agree. Over the years I've gained a newfound respect for a lot of that stuff. So much great music by Bonnie Tyler, Belinda Carlisle, Meatloaf, Bryan Adams, REO Speedwagon, Carly Simon, The Eurythmics, The Bangles, etc. etc. I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to that stuff in 1989 (my metalhead friends would have crucified me, although I did manage to sneak in liking Madonna all along), but these days I dig quite a bit of that stuff.
Their early work was a little too "new wave" for my taste, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically.
What's wrong with Ghostbusters? It was a perfect song to go with the movie.
On its own, it's probably not something I'd want to listen to much, but while watching the movie, it was fantastic, just like the rest of the movie.
It's much like any soundtrack music. The music by Howard Shore on Lord of the Rings probably isn't something you want to listen to by itself while you're jogging or whatever, but in the movie it's a perfect complement.
15 years ago when video chat with strangers was still a popular thing to do on the Internet, whenever I hosted a room, I always used the name "NumberOneBonnieTylerFan" and played her hits in the background. That you do not appreciate her music tremendously saddens me.
The comments here are pretty funny, and do almost nothing for me more so than highlight the subjectivity of musical taste. I'd never claim to be an authority on music, but as the child of a professional musician and with chops of my own that I'd describe as "good enough to entertain myself and others at times", I love so many of the songs people are ragging on here, "We Built This City" included. Sure, there's plenty of stuff that I don't go out of my way to listen to, and again, subjective, but man, fluffy pop? Corny Christmas Music? Lewd Comedies/Parodies? It's all got it's time and place.
Tearing into a popular piece of media is just really, really cathartic, and much more so if a group of people agrees with you. And if we're gonna be honest its punching up most of the time, so it seems fairly harmless. Someone brought up Nickelback, its not like they've been shoved aside from relevancy, they were super popular the entire time people tore up their music critically. If someone puts them on at karaoke (or if someone puts on Starship for that matter) I'm sure most of the place is going to sing along.
OK, I get that satire is hard, but is there really nobody capable of it besides The Onion?
This article was based on a decade-old meme when it was written. That meme didn't particularly need elaboration in 2016, and here in 2024 it has been completely forgotten.
I don't think of GQ as being a great literary magazine, but I thought it had at least some pretension to it. This is weak internet-grade satire.
This 2016 article (posted on the song's 30th anniversary... we're now coming up for its 40th anniversary) is too old to note the LadBaby cover: We Built This City on Sausage Rolls
"Worst Song of All Time" or not, it's still an immensely popular song. If you want to poke fun at the 80s and their obsession with synths, poke fun at Scritti Politi instead! (e.g. Boom! There She Washttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QmDUkxAHgQ)
Meanwhile, the feeling of that 80s synth sound has been reimagined by modern composers, giving us synthwave and all its spinoff genres, and music videos made with an AfterEffects "VHS" plugin, like Turbo Killerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er416Ad3R1g
I assume everyone who thinks We Built This City is the worst song of all time has repressed the memory of Achy-Breaky Heart, which got at least as much radio play.
It was a favorite of mine as a kid. I can still sing the whole thing, including the radio DJ part.
But I also liked Styx. So.
I probably would have liked Rush then too, but wasn’t really exposed to them until later, so they remain in the pile of culture-things I’ll simply never understand.
People bond over mutual hatred even if they didn't come to that hatred on their own. Seems like for this song, it was during slow news period when a list of worst songs came out, and it went viral. Soon it became one of those things that everyone just repeated uncritically, like your mattress doubling in weight due to dead mites. There have been many lists of worst songs before that list and many since, but once "We Built This City" took hold in the collective cultural consciousness as being the worst, there was little that could be done to change the dominate opinion.
Definitely commercial 80s cheese and mastered for a mono clock radio like most 80s soft rock but it seems a bit of hipster stretch to call this the worst or even bad.
The synth and processed drums sit in the mix reasonably well for the time frame. There are some comical 80s songs in the same time frame where the synth really doesn't sit in the mix at all but somehow it remains endearing like Europe's "Final Countdown" or even Don Henley's "Sunset Grill" or Van Halen's "Jump" all of which are rescued by other musical and production value.
Given that Van Halen was primarily a guitar player and just starting to mess with synths in his own home studio where 1984 was recorded, im gonna cut him some slack here. Not disagreeing with your assessment though, the synths on that track are cheesy and a little overwhelming.
EVH was an competition-winning piano player in his youth, and also played the drums for a bit before handing them off to Alex. Their dad was a classical musician.
This song gave Settlers of Catan players the opportunity to spend ore and (exchanged) lumber to buy a city, and then burst into "We Built This City on Rock and Wood." So it can't be all bad.
Wow, the rare double penalty. Loss of 5 yards for stooping to a Christmas song for worst song of all time debate, loss of an additional 20 yards for going with a post-Beatles McCartney track. This may be internet bullshit, but by god we have rules.
"Do They Know It's Christmas" usually makes the lists of terrible Christmas music as well.
So much Christmas music is repetitive, but coloring outside the lines is a tough thing to do with Christmas music. The Pogues nailed it with "Fairytale of New York", but it largely appeals only to GenX and younger.
I will literally leave a store if this is playing.
But also, the fact that you are damn near guaranteed to run into this song _yearly_ qualifies it to be way higher up than any other song on a "worst song" list (even if it weren't already at #1).
Aaagh you monster it's only November and now that horrible aimless effected wobbly chord fever dream is stuck in my head again. I had at least another couple weeks before hearing it for the first time this year.
I never understood how something could be so bland and yet so revolting at the same time, like a smoothie made of wallpaper paste and dog shit.
You've got to give credit to the genius of McCartney's musicianship, that songs perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being stuck in a nightmare you can't escape from.
As a musician, I sometimes make music that I don't like, but just have to get out of my head, feeling compelled to finish a track just to put that pesky musical idea to rest. Recording a track is akin to closing the lid on the coffin; there's nothing more to do, and you can move on.
I wonder if Paul had that experience with that song. The nightmarish chord line is catchy. So he got it out of his head by turning it into a track...
...and ended up getting it in our heads.
I wonder if he thinks "You complain? You can just turn it off. I had to live with that song!". We should be grateful for only being exposed to it once a year, along with the seasonal flu.
How does he sing out of tune on his own darn song? If he's not out of tune, those awfully strained high notes shouldn't have been written in whatever weird key they're in.
Yeah, I mean it's pretty silly to declare something "the worst song of all time" - everyone has their personal taste and their own personal songs they love to hate. For me, it's (of course) Wham's Last Christmas and I Will Always Love You (sorry Whitney, but back in the 90s when I was watching a lot of MTV, listening to a lot of radio, and ads for Bodyguard were all over the place, I seem to have developed an allergy to this song).
And BTW, I wouldn't even call this the quintessential 80s song, for me that's Stevie Wonder's I Just Called to Say I Love You, with that cheapo synthesizer bleeping along in the background. Oh well, to quote Calvin Harris, it was "acceptable in the 80s"...
That's actually tied with Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)". Listen carefully and you can hear Yoko Ono screeching incredibly far out of tune as the piece climaxes. It's not in the forefront of the song, but it's there, and it's stuck out so much to me ever since I first noticed it.
If this song isn't proof that Paul McCartney is a psychopath, I don't know what is. It is absolutely the most insipid, uninspired piece of garbage ever to be recorded.
Honestly, I find its wackiness quite refreshing. I will always take it over "All I want for Christmas", "Driving Home For Christmas" or "Last Christmas".
Mostly. But they're also doing it as a gag, so you're expected to understand the joke is two ostensible "losers" claiming rock greatness (and doing it with a capable example of the stereotypical bombast you'd expect from the music being parodied/paid homage).
Spoiler alert: It's not the worst song of all time. There is no one single "worst song", just as there's no one single "best song". It may be one of the worst, sure. But when doing something this subjective, there's no way everyone in the world universally agrees on everything...including "worst" and "best".
I don't care how many "experts" they asked or whatever, it's not the worst song. It always bugs the heck out of me when I see clickbait crap like this. If they think "We Built This City" is worst than...say..."My Pal Foot-Foot" by The Shaggs, then it just means this writer is full of shit.
On this side-topic, Wikipedia has trouble writing e.g. "worst X of all time", because that can't ever be an objective fact... so instead it has articles named "List of X considered the worst" and "List of X notable for negative reception", to which things like "Worst X of all time" redirect:
Everyone already knows there is no objectively worse song, and the writer knows everyone knows. It's hyperbole to emphasize the writer's opinion that it's a really bad song, an inconsequential rhetorical flourish no reasonable person takes seriously.
I like the song, while simultaneously have a lengthy history of enthusiastically enjoying truly intolerable indie music.
The too-cool-for-hit-pop shtick has been over for at least a decade. Hipster snark is stale, itself deeply uncool, and low IQ. I'm unsurprised that this is a GQ article. Cultural media is in a fully-terminal tailspin.
In summary, We Built This City is a great American song. Catch me at the next karaoke night.
The song I wish the radio would stop playing today is "Murder on the Dance Floor"
Something about the way the singer sings it just feels unusually soulless. After listening to it, I am completely convinced that if the DJ did kill the groove, Ellis-Baxter wouldn't give a shit.
I mean... objectively "10 Coolest Things about New Jersey" is a worse song, but let's not pretend Bloodhound Gang's music is meant to be taken seriously.
And let's be doubly fair, 'Screwing You on a Beach at Night' is a perfectly serviceable techno/dance beat. And a lot of their music is that, perfectly competent. But then they pair it with the stupidest fucking lyrics as possible. Often describing the very themes of most songs in the most crass way possible.
I mean, one of the lyrics is literally "Echo" as it echos. He's just describing the song.
Yeah...but when I started playing with Rebirth (software) in the late 90s, I remember recreating that song as I learned how to sequence drums, bass, and lead synths. It's definitely a corny song, but I needed to branch out from recreating "Blue Monday" (despite it being a better song).
Why all the hate for Caillou? I personally think it's the Caillou theme song which ranks up there with "We Built This City" for irritating earworms. But there's another theory: "Bitch Caillou"
There are two "seasons" or personalities of Caillou. I'm not 100% positive which one came first, only that my kids grew up watching the kind Caillou.
The other Caillou season or personality is "Bitch Caillou." Kind Caillou was a staple of the Sprout channel on cable TV and all three of my kinds were able to enjoy this Caillou. About a year ago, PBS Kids expanded the Caillou episodes (because if you've seen Caillou, you've seen the Magnetman episode 100 fucking times) and started playing "Bitch Caillou" episodes as well.
Kind Caillou is a little four year old who learns the easy way and the hard way how to be a better sibling and about the world around him. He learns how to be nice to kids who aren't nice to him, how to clean up, try new foods, and how much fun magnets are. He also goes to an apple orchard and I love apples.
Bitch Caillou complains, cries, and is generally a little asshole of a kid you'd probably trip if he was running around the supermarket. He is rude to his sister, a smart mouth to his parents, and doesn't know a single fucking thing about sharing his toys.
I think that the Bitch Caillou episodes were the originals because everyone I know with older kids wants to kill the little bald headed brat (and the overall look is a little more simple and silly) but everyone I know with comparable aged children to my own- have seen Caillou's good side.
The fact that this song (and this incarnation of this group) has any association with "After Bathing At Baxters", "Surrealistic Pillow", "Crown of Creation" or "Blows Against the Empire" is somewhat tragic.
Its been awhile since I've seen it but Spinal Tap was making fun of a lot of bands like that, its part of their fictional band's backstory. They start out much like the Stones with some simple catchy early 60's tunes, turn into a hippie band, then quickly transform into metal in order to follow the money.
It's happened many times. Fleetwood Mac went from hard blues in the 1970s to straight pop in the 1980s. A surprising number of 1970s prog rock bands (Genesis, Yes, Rush, The Moody Blues) turned into 1980s synth pop bands.
Fleetwood Mac is a good example, actually. Regarding 1970s prog rock bands, their 80s work is for the most part still pretty original and musically honest. One notable outlier is Phil Collins whose solo stuff is truely aweful IMO. (How can you go from being the drummer of Genesis to writing "A Groovy Kind of Love"?)
For those complaining that it's not "the worst song of all time," yes, we all know it's not the worst song. This includes the clickbaiters who claim it is.
It's cheesy, it's simple, Grace Slick hates it. All those factors make it fashionable to hate it, and it's been like that for a long time. However, it's also catchy, fun, and the lyrics are easy to remember. It's a karaoke staple for all those reasons, good and bad.
For some reason, this mention of Starship's "We Built This City" led me down a hole of Internet research on my own personal Mandala Effect rabbit hole. I remembered as a kid, the Residents - who I only knew at the time as a bunch of guys wearing eyeballs as their heads - being part of the video for "We Built This City". I later became a fan of the Residents, who hadn't mentioned this at all. No evidence of them appearing with Starship, including the video for "We Built this City". But I hadn't been able to shake this vision for decades. Did I imagine it?
Tonight, digging deeper, I found it! I found the source. In 1984, just a year before "We Built this City", Jefferson Starship (the progenitor of Starship, we won't mention the Airplane here) released a video for their ostensible hit single "Layin' it on the Line".
There they were! The Residents! In a terrible, terrible Jefferson Starship video! Sung by Grace Slick and, uh, that dude from Starship!
Strangely, I'll be able to sleep deeply tonight knowing that this mystery that was knawing at my soul for so many years has finally been solved.
With a promotion like "terrible, terrible Jefferson Starship video," I needed to go watch it.
That really was just a completely incoherent mess. But the guys with eyeballs on their heads were there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqLnVgR7fLw
I feel like I should be familiar with this song but I'm not, and I have to say, truly one of the great choruses of 80's rock: "we're layin' it on the line (layin' it on the line) ---just layin' it all, right on the line".
Every once in awhile I see an 80s video or movie, and remember: yeah, wow, people really did have giant hair back then.
It's not giant when everyone is doing it: it's just normal.
And what do you have against letting your soul glo? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=961x0NmyHKE
I find Lionel Richie a phenomenon. The hair and moustache look weird now, but his songs stand the test of time.
Richie closing out the 1984 Olympics was most excellent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zj7C3GRj7s
Somewhere in here you can hear Jim McKay explaining the difference between "poppers" and "break dancers" and it is just awesome.
“Lionel Richie's Hello is the Battleship Potemkin of rock music videos...”
~ Humphrey B. Flaubert, TISM, If You're Not Famous at Fourteen, You're Finished - De RigueurMortis (2001)
+1, but then my copy of Rick James' Street Songs has grooves cut into it, so what do I know of music?
A lot of things have always been pretty boring. People wanting to be seen were less likely to look boring though, so there's a selection effect there.
It's true. I knew a person who got stopped by customs on an international flight because they thought no person could conceivably have 12 cans of hair spray in their luggage for innocent purposes (she did- for creating the massive 80s hair).
I wonder how anyone got anything done in those days. It must take hours and tens of dollars in hair spray every day to get your hair that big
as they say about anime characters -- higher the hair, closer to god
I'll see your incoherent mess and raise you:
https://youtu.be/UJ1tBVtYOBc?si=gSho4eXJMV96onaw
Surely this must have been when some new "clip art for video" technology had just appeared?
The song slaps though.
The Quantel Paintbox is the usual suspect for early 1980s video graphics excesses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox
The wireframe 3D graphics in that video must have been rendered in something else, though. Maybe it was made on Amiga with VideoToaster?
The original Amiga with its 8MHz 68000 CPU had just enough horsepower for that kind of 3D.
The song was released in 1986, which is years before the Video Toaster and the LightWave 3D software were released. They might have used an Amiga 1000 for some of it.
"Quantel Paintbox" is generally regarded as the most beautiful phrase in the English language, having taken the reins from "Cellar Door".
"It can't be worse than the Starship video"
o_O
This is pretty uninspiring, but let me be honest. I'd vote for Mick and Slick at this point. :P
What the heck did I just watch?
You mean Mandela effect, don't you? If not, the name Mandala is yet another Mandela effect. :D
The Mandala effect is forgetting that the effect is about Nelson Mandela not a Buddhist exercise in impermanence.
Damn son. That line is epic. Pretend I somehow gave you another dozen votes.
It was always mandala effect. The fractal like nature of mandala characterize the wispy tenuous nature of ones memory.
No, it's named for Nelson Mandela. Because when he died people falsely thought they remembered him dying a couple of decades before. But they likely conflated his release from prison with his death.
Bena, the post you are responding to was joking. "It always was something different" - gaslighting - is the entire point of the Mandela Effect.
And well done, GP: I laughed outloud!
While possible, it’s also entirely likely that he was mistaken. And it’s a reasonable mistake, so that’s why I provided the context of the origin and didn’t try to shame him for not knowing.
And “gnawing,” not “knawing”! :)
Sign of our times -- starship more popular than airplane
Balin had that whiney edge that was in style (and probably always is).
I remember having my own rabbit hole with the Residents band.
In junior high I used to stay up late and watch Letterman. He used to have Chris Elliot the comedian on doing various bits. He had one that imitated the Residents where Chris and several other people dressed up in weird outfits called something like "Maumoshcantz" or something French sounding. Chris' costume had a big black box with three toilet rolls for the face on it and played bizarre, "avant-garde" music. When they finished, Chris came over to sit with Dave. Dave tried to announce the name of the band and Chris scolded him by over pronouncing the name. Then Dave asked what part Chris played and he exclaimed, "I played the guy with toilet rolls on his head Dave! Shesssh!"
I recounted the bit to a friend and he instantly said the whole bit was a tilt of the cap to the band The Residents and it poked fun at their outfits and members on purpose.
This lead me, pre-internet to start digging around to find out what I could about the band. A few weeks later there was some MTV News story about a musician who died that apparently was one of the members. They made light of the fact nobody knew this since the band had purposefully concealed their identities so they could rotate out people as necessary and then say they just wanted people to focus on the music instead. Strangely enough, there was a similar story making the rounds on the internet about something similar that Slipknot was doing and Corey Taylor even used the same reason they wear masks - so fans can focus more in the music! This of course, brought back memories in my own research that eventually concluded with an older brother of a friend who was into really weird stuff and gave me a somewhat sordid history of the The Residents, and some the eerie connections to their management team Cryptic Corporation. He even pulled out several albums saying there's a possibility The Beatles WERE the Residents and showed me the two albums "Meet the Residents" and "Meet the Beatles" album as proof. Keep in mind, I was like 10, my buddies brother was like 16; so imagine how that conversation went down.
Anyways, thanks for bringing this up, it was really fun remembering my own rabbit hole with that band. Which interestingly enough, started with a David Letterman bit and ended with similar rumors swirling around Slipknot.
The Letterman bit must have been parodying Mummenschanz, an avant-garde Swiss theater group that was pretty popular (as those things go) at the time. They do feel a bit in the same corner of the arts universe as the Residents...
Yes, this was Mummenschanz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdTYScKgEus
Mandala effect a typo?
It should be Mandela effect, but this is the 2nd time I've seen Mandala in its place.
Are you sure it's supposed to be "Mandela effect"?
Yes; it is named for the mistaken belief that Mandela died in prison during the 80s.
Nope. Ironically that’s something people misremember about the origin of the Mandala effect, which existed long before Nelson Mandela died.
But he did?
Or didn't he?
Whoosh :)
Like aluminum and flavor. My spellchecker does not agree even if I write those words correctly.
You have your spellchecker set wrong: you need to set it to US English, not UK English.
It defaults to US. That is why it doesn't like correctly spelled colours and flavours of aluminium.
The Residents' Hello Skinny lives perpetually in my head, refusing to pay rent and is somehow immune to eviction notices
>"Layin' it on the Line"
Damn that song is great! Seems to have an anti-war message too.
The Residents for Presidents!
You can't tell the story and then not link the video!
The idea of a worst song of all time is silly, but I want to use this as an excuse to juxtapose We Built this City with another Starship hit: Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now. The latter is just as fluffy and corny, but instead of generic corporate rock it's a soaring silly power ballad duet.
I think the secret sauce is Diane Warren. It's the same reason I love belting out I Don't Want to Miss a Thing at karaoke, or listening to If I Could Turn Back Time on a loop while working.
This post has been sponsored by the Committee to Get Diane Warren into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (CGDWRRHF).
The idea that "We Built This City" is somehow worse than all the garbage pop music hits that have come out in the past 20 years is absurd. Sure, "We Built This City" is pretty cheesy, and certainly not the best example of 80s rock, but at least it's listenable, unlike the overly-compressed and Autotuned crap that modern pop is.
I could easily go find 10 on Apple Music without even trying. “… of all time” indeed lol
I agree that a "worst song of all time" is a bit silly, but if someone was trying to make the worst song of all time that would still get regular radio play and you asked me for ideas, "put a traffic report in the middle of the song" would be pretty high on my ideas list.
I say that with love as I absolutely love the We Built This City (and Starship for that matter)
I know your description includes "still get regular radio play", but one of my favourite pieces of troll music is "The Most Unwanted Song". They surveyed people to find the things they liked least in music and put it all together. I don't want to spoil just how creatively awful it is or what's in there, so I'll just drop the link and go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
I unironically enjoy this, along with The Most Wanted Song.
Personally I find The Most Wanted Song rather bland, though. Whereas the Most Unwanted Song has some genuinely annoying bits, but other bits are quite listenable and interesting, so all in all I much prefer it over the "Wanted" song.
The Black Eyed Peas just name days of the week in the middle of I Gotta Feeling. That song is similarly stupid and also kind of sublime.
I mean...c'mon..they could have at least picked a "worst song of all time" that wasn't a Billboard Top 100 #1 hit. Ditto for "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"...
In what universe is "We built this City" the worst song ever? I love that song. Awesome bit of 80s power pop.
I'd rather hear We built this City 10 times in a row than any 10 songs of Taylor Swift's. How about that?
The same one that hates Nickelback (they're not great, but terrible?, nah), clowns ("eek, let's collectively decide to feign fear at the humorously funny looking people with big shoes at the circus, even without having read "It"!"), and "moist" (who wants an arid cupcake?).
There are anti-fads, too.
Haha these internet fads are great. Especially when you hang out with people who aren’t chronically online.
There was also the bit about gauges and hipsters (which just became the most mainstream). Then there was the fedora hate which I think was the funniest because I knew about it (because I’m chronically online) and then one day I’m traveling through Japan with my friends and the girls are all like “you should try out these hats at this store” and it’s piece for piece exactly what Reddit would hate. But the girls loved it on the lads and I’m married to one now.
It’s like how here people are always like “oh I’d never give X a buck they’re stealing all your data” and then out in the real world people love Google, like adore it. What’s the deal with that?
One of my coworkers stated this a few years ago: "i'm on an interesting musical journey right now: trying to identify musicians/groups/bands/artists, etc. that i've over looked because they were "mainstream" popular"
And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.
I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
> I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
I feel like that's often part of it. Something that represents peak (whatever) in terms of a sound. The sort of highly-polished result that almost sounds like it was AI-generated by a model trained on exactly what was popular over the past few years.
Of course, you don't need AI to do it - just slightly more human and manual analysis of trends, sales, marketing, and production techniques.
I unironically love the band Winger. They’re probably most famous now for becoming instantly uncool once Mike Judge drew Stewart in a Winger tshirt on Beavis and Butthead in the 90s.
The thing is though, they’re amazing musicians. Kip Winger is premiering another one of his classical works with the Nashville Symphony in the next few weeks. Reb Beach is one of the most skilled and melodic guitar players to come out of the 80s. They wrote and continue to write some great songs too if you like that kind of music.
Music snobbery is just silly, and robs you of the joy of discovering some great new music while simultaneously robbing others of it too. Everybody loses.
On a parallel track, I've been continually amazed at how even as someone interested in broad musical categories, how many bands I've never heard of who were 'mainstream' popular in some way - maybe not top 40 radio but at least on some radio somewhere, or were #1 at some point in some not completely niche genre. there's just so much music out there, even so much good music.
I find “We build this city” is both very moist and very enjoyable at the same time.
I remember REM self-nominating 'Shiny Happy People ' as the worst song. And even though it was one of their most successful songs in the charts they refused to play it live.
Denis Leary: I want you to pull this bus over on the side of the Pretentiousness Turnpike! I want the shiny people over here, and the happy people over here.
Shame they think that. Anything with Kate Pierson singing and moving gets my vote.
On the flip side of this, generally speaking I like every duet I’ve heard with Stipe. Except this one.
Campfire Song with 10,000 Maniacs. And Kid Fears with the Indigo Girls still gives me chills.
Stipe singing other people's songs: good. Stipe writing songs: sometimes acceptable.
I like to joke/start arguments by saying that R.E.M's greatest album was "Sentimental Hygiene".
I was "Lucky" to hear him join Radiohead on stage to sing one of their songs back in 98 (iirc).
Indeed. As with all things, "popular" and "good" are two very different qualities that aren't always correlated with each other.
Shiny happy people is so non- REM by REM. It is just out of place.
I think it was meant to be satirical. Like, it’s supposed to be about how the old folks want the young folks to be. Pleasant times.
No one is ever going to be as happy as the guy in the purple shirt and black beret in that music video. Not even Ren and Stimpy.
Or out of time.
I'll see myself out.
Maybe you'll like the reverse, (possibly) the most REM song by non-REM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSltuCqOzJY
We Built This City is fun forgettable pop music. Shiny Happy People was wretched from day one. Fight me.
The lyrics are cheesy, but I find the music, harmonies/performance to be just fine. Wouldn't be the first decent song with crap lyrics.
SHP is a song for kids. They didn't write it for you.
https://youtu.be/VRfhX-XAIiY?t=3820
In what universe is "We built this City" the worst song ever?
In this universe where 90% of music-related journalism boils down to competitive hipster snark.
I love the song, but I was ten when it came out, so of course I do.
I think you're missing the point. WBtC is a "bad" song in exactly the same way that Swift's songs are "bad". It's unashamedly pop, aimed at tastes that sophisticated listeners try to escape, and critically: is so good that those sophisticated listeners find themselves listening to it anyway.
It's basically a bouncing, bopping reminder that we aren't as smart as we think we are.
Yeah, if you're looking at it from a composition/music theory angle, it's not your typical 4 chord pop song. There are thirds in the bass all over place that provide interesting contrary motion to the chords, and the verse and chorus are technically in different keys. It's not genius writing but it's definitely not lazy.
And unlike modern pop (not sure about Taylor Swift), it doesn't use Autotune or have extreme compression.
I like that it mentions Marconi, who created the first real wireless communication system.
Yes, but for some reason he plays the "mamba". Seems dangerous.
https://drawception.com/game/SfOgtYXbsj/marconi-plays-the-ma...
Indeed - it's full of pedal tones, and slash chords. love it, love it.
As the father of a middle schooler I was recently forced to listen to a lot of Taylor Swift. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that she's enormously talented, even if I don't like her pop era or public personality. (And my daughter has moved past it, mostly because of the personality thing. I'm proud.)
I had forgotten just how much I hated that inescapable song in the 80s. Definitely close to my worst song ever. There's plenty of 80s pop that I've softened my views on as I got older and even started to grudgingly appreciate, but not "we built this city".
I don't think I'd even recognize a single Taylor Swift song. I plan to keep it that way, currently she's just a name and a face to me, knowing her music would probably only cause me to dislike her unfairly.
Eh. Swift isn't my cup of tea; you're much more likely to find me at an industrial metal show. However, she's crazy talented, and her music is well-produced and wildly catchy. She's really good at what she does.
Along those lines, I'd never pay to see Britney Spears perform, but "Toxic" goes hard.
Their music shouldn't make you dislike them. It's not objectively awful, not by a long shot. If anything, just acknowledge we're not the target audience and move on.
> She's really good at what she does.
I too try to avoid falling into the all-too-typical trope of reflexively hating on what's broadly popular just because it's popular. While I'm also not a big fan of Swift's music, I agree it's consistently very well executed. I also think she deserves genuine respect for remaining both artistically and financially successful for well over a decade without imploding like so many pop stars seem to. I suspect this requires both intelligence and strength of character.
Yeah I know. Because I just don't like pop music, and having understood she's got a reputation as really talented, actually hearing her music only risks downgrading my impression of her. I'm fine with being out of touch/irrelevant.
My kids (and their friends too) don't listen to current music either, so I don't get much exposure to it.
I'm a metalhead and never been much of a Taylor Swift fan, but important people in my life have been for the last almost 20 years so I know a decent amount about it.
I think her earlier music really demonstrates her talent. Well. Again, it's not my favorite, but it is genuinely really well written, creative, and well performed. Her newer stuff after she switched to more of a pop sound, I have a very hard time finding the talent. If I didn't know some of her work already from the earlier days, I would absolutely not recognize the talent even if it sits there in a latent form.
It feels like you’re afraid to listen to it in case you end up liking it.
>In what universe is "We built this City" the worst song ever?
In the universe where William Shatner covers it, as he did with "Rocket Man."[0]
So yes, there are many worse songs and even worse renditions of better songs.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Lq8hRIw8c
Most of the comments here are going to predictably call out that "We Built This City" is not the worst song of all time and offer up an example that's ostensibly worse.
But I think a very important caveat missing from the article and all of the comments here is that Blender/VH1 never said it was the worse song of all time. They said it was the most "awesomely bad" song of all time. To which I 100% agree with. Its not worst songs, its good catchy songs that are also objectively bad. And I think "awesomely bad" is just a great way to title it. We can all agree "We Built This City" is a catchy ear worm you can rock out to in the car, it lifts my spirits whenever it gets played. It stands on the pantheon of terrible but awesome hits like "Ice Ice Baby", "She Bangs", and the Ghostbusters theme song.
Nobody is saying you shouldn't listen to "We Built This City". Its a guilty pleasure. Crank that mother up on your car ride home alone and rock the fuck out.
It's a brilliant song for this reason: Read the lyrics to the song. It's a song about what they now call gentrifcation. The video and song are in the post-corporatized/gentified world where once true rock reigned. It's supposed to sound phony as hell.
> It's supposed to sound phony as hell.
It makes sense in hindsight, but I'm pretty sure it was not intentional :)
> good catchy songs that are also objectively bad
"Objectively bad"? What are the "objective criteria" they're using? I'd argue that no art can be "objectively bad". That's not how art works.
Jordan Peele does a fantastic impersonation of Ray Parker Jr. (“the Ghostbusters guy”) promoting his lesser known movie theme songs he’s submitted through the years. Talk about bad songs! Jumanji, Passion of the Christ, Apt Pupil. lol. https://youtu.be/GxjNOv5QPzM?si=zSduoOlbIULoKOMC
There's a lot of weird revisionism when it comes to judging 1980s music (eg [1]). It actually feels like a lot of 90s kids just being haters. There's been analysis that you basically like whatever was popular when you were 14 [2].
Additionally, it seems like more modern music just isn't enduring [3] in the same way music from the 1950s to 1980s was. Just the fact that people today know about "We Built this City" nearly 40 years after it was released tells you something. I honestly think that unless you grow up in the 2000s you could go and play the music from 2000 to 2010 (as an example) and it would overall be much less recognizable than music from the 1960s and 1970s is.
Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time". It's recognizable. People know it. It has a vibe. Millenials who grew up on 90s grunge may see it differently but that doesn't really mean anything.
[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/readers-poll-...
[2]: https://archive.is/zM4xq
[3]: https://stereomonosunday.com/2019/03/23/why-modern-music-is-...
Modern music isn't as recognizable because there's way more of it, it's more varied, and doesn't get played a billion times over radio and MTV to a huge audience. The record industry isn't what it was at all, as detailed in your link. Jukeboxes with a selection of hits used to exist, now they're like spotify clients instead. I don't agree with you saying it's less enduring, though. That's a different thing. You shouldn't confuse popularity and number of plays for quality. For me there are some songs I'll hold on to a long time that I first heard in the last 10 years. There's still great music being made, IMO, but then pop from any era rarely was what I'd call good.
Speaking to that, the most played song on Spotify, ever, is "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd. Came out 5 years ago, and it's "okay"; funny enough, it triggers a lot of 80s nostalgia with its instrumentals. So, there's a data point for you to ponder.
What I find really interesting of late is YouTube Music suggesting sleeper hits to me, that were big 20-30 years ago, but somehow missed out on them. "Somewhere Only We Know" has been on rotation in some shopping venues & showed up on my playlist; it was a hit, 20 years ago, yet somehow missed out on it.
Really? I get annoyed because after 4 or 5 decent picks based on whatever song I start with, it inevitably shifts to the most well-known, overplayed singles by any related band.
> There's been analysis that you basically like whatever was popular when you were 14 [2].
I was clearly excluded from this analysis, seeing as how out of the entries in the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2006, I can see exactly three songs that I somewhat enjoy alongside dozens of songs that I hate with a passion. I'd sooner listen to "We Built This City" on repeat for 24 hours straight than listen any of the Top 10 of that year even once (with the sole exception of "Crazy").
I'd find that analysis to be more believable if it filtered by genres/subcultures a bit. I hung out with the metalheads when I was 14, so a lot of rock and metal artists/groups that were popular in 2006-ish - SoaD, Disturbed, Evanescence, Lacuna Coil, Mushroomhead, Nightwish, Dream Theater, Lacuna Coil, Dethklok, Blind Guardian, and the like - are the ones that stuck around at the top of my personal rankings.
I like 80s music a lot, i was 14 in 89, so that computes. But what i find weird (and not at the same time) is that a lot of <20yo like the 80s-90s!
> There's a lot of weird revisionism when it comes to judging 1980s music (eg [1]).
Disclaimer, I grew up in the 90s and became an adult around 9/11.
All 80s pop music is terrible with the exception of Thriller. There was an over reliance on cheesy synths and reverbed drum machines, (and cocaine) and almost none of it is redeemable 30 years later. To me, it all sounds dated and bad. If you grew up in the 80s it probably sounds good.
Pop producers and technology finally reached a point in the 90s where electronic synths and drum machines sound cohesive and more natural.
You can pry Higher Love and its cheesy horn synths from my cold dead hands.
Ok, Steve Winwood gets a pass :)
> Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time".
There may be other contenders, but if this song doesn't make the short list for you, I can't explain it. I doubt I could pay anyone to make such an outrageous claim.
It seems like this entire thread is a counterargument to your claim.
It's not a counterargument at all. It's just someone who assumes that there is this great counterargument they haven't bothered to make while whining "there are other bad songs too". Your comment here indicates that you're just too young to have heard it every single day, twice a day, throughout your childhood as it inexplicably got constant airtime. The long ride to and from school on the schoolbus, my first experience with torture. At least on sundays you could turn Solid Gold off. This is like saying "Vietnam wasn't that bad" because you watched a war movie once.
> ... heard it every single day, twice a day, throughout your childhood
If it was so terrible, why did it get played so often?
When I think "terrible", I think of the movie "The Room", which has been called the Citizen Kane of bad movies. It is truly awful. The dialog is awful. The acting is awful. There are all sorts of logical inconsistencies where things inextricably appear and disappear. By any metric it's bad. It's so bad that it has a cult following because it's so bad.
"We Built This City" just isn't anything like that.
Compare it to My Humps [1] or What Does the Fox Say [2] or Friday, just to name a few? These are a few random songs that are all miles worse than We Built This City.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEe_eraFWWs
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE
And they are still not even as bad as a lot of basically redundant modern pop with the deliberately atonal robovox, trap beats, and flat production.
Your comment here indicates that you're just too young to have heard it every single day, twice a day, throughout your childhood as it inexplicably got constant airtime.
So your argument is basically just a no true Scotsman.
I grew up listening to it. I still enjoy it. I also still enjoy Rock Me Amadeus, and Kashagoogoo's Never Ending Story theme, too.
I was ten. How old were you? I ask because your recollection has strong "seething teen" energy.
I think you're conflating "overplayed" with "just plain bad."
I'm in my 40s and loved it as a kid.
[flagged]
I didn't know Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to this song. Man, that's gotta sting.
But if I was making a list of Awful, Terrible Songs, I'm not sure I would have even included this one, mostly because I wouldn't remember it existed. Maybe that's what makes it bad--it was in constant rotation in the 80s, but as soon as they stopped playing it regularly I just... forgot it existed.
Looking at various lists of "Worst Songs" always confuses me. A lot of them are just really popular songs that got overplayed. Wikipedia's page says the Spandau Ballet's "True" is one, which is just nuts.
> But if I was making a list of Awful, Terrible Songs, I'm not sure I would have even included this one
I wouldn't. It's not a great song or anything, but I can easily come up with a lengthy list of songs that are far, far worse.
> I didn't know Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to this song. Man, that's gotta sting.
It would Sting more if we were talking about a song like "Fields of Gold."
Phil Collins and Sting both went from hard-rocking tunes to elevator music with very little warning. It’s hard to believe Sting went from The Police to the sublime Bring On The Night to Fields of Gold.
I think there are songs that wear listeners out from being overplayed, some that require repeated listens to appreciate, but there are ones that start out bad and do not get redeemed either by repeated listens or context. Lift Yourself (https://youtu.be/8fbyfDbi-MI?t=117), Gucci Gang (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LfJnj66HVQ), and Beautiful Things (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa_RSwwpPaA&pp=ygUQQmVhdXRpZ...) all exist as examples of this, I think. All fairly recent, I'll confess.
It's a consequentialist sort of "worst": (lack of) artistic quality multiplied by exposure and impact. Couple that with how hard aesthetic quality is to assess and you get some odd lists.
This song brings back good memories for me. Other songs from that era I remember are "Life in a Northern Town", "Walk Like an Egyptian", some Corey Hart songs.
Right there in the first paragraph: “At the time, Starship's most famous member, singer Grace Slick, was 46.”
Grace Slick was born in 1939, so she was among the oldest of her cohort already in the Sixties. She’s one of the strangest things about pop history for me, right up there with Debbie Harry being over thirty when Blondie hit it big, and Stuart Murdoch being accepted by Glasgow hipster circles well into his late 30s. Pop music is so youth-centered, and that youth audience has often been highly suspicious and deprecating of people much older than them, that it baffles me that these performers still flourished.
A lot of the leaders of the hippies were actually older than that generation, despite the classic "don't trust anyone over 30" and "hope I die before I get old" sentiments of the movement. For example, both Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (who founded the "Youth International Party" or yippies, which mutated into hippies) were born in the 1930s, a decade or more older than most hippies.
Aerosmith was about to call it quits, they did that duet with Run DMC and had another handful of platinum records afterward. Tyler was ~38 when Walk This Way charted the second time. Many of their greatest hits are from after they were old.
And then there was Tom Petty, who had hits in three decades. Practically David Bowie levels of staying power.
Dude sang about smoking weed, hanging out, and loving each other. None of that goes out of style.
His cameo in The Postman was the best part of that movie.
Well then, the mystery surrounding how old Ric Ocasek of The Cars will make you even more baffled:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/reader-center/ric-ocasek-...
Perhaps the exceptions that prove the rule then.
Stephin Merritt was 34 when 69 Love Songs came out.
Dick Taylor was an early member of the Rolling Stones and then in his 40s joined the Mekons and played guitar on some of their best records.
I'm sure there are more fun examples.
I strongly object that "We built this city" is the worst song of all time.
Especially when we live in a world where "Sweet Caroline" (specifically sung by Neil Diamond) is a thing.
Let’s all take a moment to recognize that, really, this discussion is about good bad songs.
Bob Dylan made three records of Christian music and 80% of the tracks from those are definitely worse than anything anyone’s discussing here.
There’s bad, and then there’s bad. The bad stuff is so bad it doesn’t even come up in worst-song conversations. Nor in so-bad-it’s-good conversations.
Dylan's gospel albums are classics. Documentaries have been made about how good they are. IIRC "Shot of Love" is one of Dylan's favorites of his own records.
Many fans rejected them at the time because of the culture shock of his religious pivot, but that reaction was about the content, not the music, and has long faded. Nowadays it's understood that the sudden-fan-alienation-move is a Dylan thing, just like when he went electric at Newport in the first place.
I'm not gonna argue that "Man gave names to all the animals" is one of Dylan's finest, but I'd be interested to know which specific tracks you think are terrible, because those records are full of great songs, and so are some of the outtakes.
If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
Admittedly, I’ve only listened to the supposedly-best one (Slow Train Coming, maybe? It’s been a while) and the supposedly-worst one (Saved?) of the three. The former got my toe tapping a couple times IIRC but was mostly forgettable—it was on its account that I allowed that as much as 20% of the three albums, together, might not qualify as very-bad. The latter was back-to-front a slog of a listen. The musical equivalent of contractor-beige painted walls with off-white trim. One of the dullest albums I’ve ever heard, and I owned some stinkers in my high school years.
I sometimes like religious music, so that aspect’s not a deal-breaker for me. One of my favorite local bands was kinda secretly a Christian rock band, they just veiled the references enough and shifted things more-poetic so they didn’t sound ultra cheesy from the very first line like that stuff usually does, and probably some listeners didn’t even notice (they didn’t bill themselves as Christian rock and played normal venues). I love the couple of very-Christian tracks on Springsteen’s Nebraska.
> If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
Sadly(?) that album-trilogy is the latest Dylan I’ve heard, so I can’t say whether it gets worse (but I’d believe it).
Whenever the topic of strikingly bad songs comes up, I always like to link to Spaced Out - The Best of Leonard Nimoy & William Shatner[1] which is an album truly breathtaking in its badness. Everyone I've ever played the CD for has agreed it's the best bad music they've ever heard.
1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k8rGB_NGkgen0y...
Maybe not as strikingly bad, you ever heard Pat Boone's In A Metal Mood? [1] Someone stole my copy of that in high school... I suspect they had another thing coming.
[1] https://youtu.be/J7ktY8L6v0A?feature=shared
How about some Big Head Todd, with this riveting chorus:
It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender
It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender
(these 8 lines are repeated 4 times through the song)
Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe through the tulips" beats that by a country mile. Watch it on youtube and be horrified.
But that was a "novelty song" -- you weren't supposed to like it unironically even at the time.
Looking Glass: "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" occupies that space in my brain.
The Muzak system at a retail job I worked played it all the time and we came to despise the song. It became a bit of a proto-Rickroll for those of us who worked there to trick others into hearing it. But the song became much more interesting once I learned about the urban legend connecting it to Mary Ellis. That the writer of the song says there's no connection just makes it that much more enticing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellis_grave
Not "Total Eclipse of the Heart"?
Or "Ghostbusters" (sorry, Ray, loved your earlier stuff)?
Or Huey Lewis and the News entire catalog?
What are you... Total Eclipse of the Heart is all in power. Were you alive when it was playing on radio all the time? Being played too much doesn't make it bad.
When you realise the song is about vampires there’s no way this ever goes back on any “worst song” list.
That's a superficial gloss over an even deeper and weirder back story behind the filthiest song ever scrawled on a napkin: https://youtu.be/LGqYnj_Y3CI?t=73
Hah no way. It would seem like a reasonable interpretation.
... I don't know what to do, I'm always in the dark ... Once upon a time, there was light in my life But now there's only love in the dark ...
> Or Huey Lewis and the News entire catalog?
Under no circumstances can "power of love" be a bad song
Heart and Soul is probably my favorite. And Sports has more hooks than a tackle shop.
Total eclipse of the heart is a fuckin banger.
As a self-identified metalhead who hated 80's pop in the 80's, I have to agree. Over the years I've gained a newfound respect for a lot of that stuff. So much great music by Bonnie Tyler, Belinda Carlisle, Meatloaf, Bryan Adams, REO Speedwagon, Carly Simon, The Eurythmics, The Bangles, etc. etc. I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to that stuff in 1989 (my metalhead friends would have crucified me, although I did manage to sneak in liking Madonna all along), but these days I dig quite a bit of that stuff.
> Or Huey Lewis and the News entire catalog?
Their early work was a little too "new wave" for my taste, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically.
What's wrong with Ghostbusters? It was a perfect song to go with the movie.
On its own, it's probably not something I'd want to listen to much, but while watching the movie, it was fantastic, just like the rest of the movie.
It's much like any soundtrack music. The music by Howard Shore on Lord of the Rings probably isn't something you want to listen to by itself while you're jogging or whatever, but in the movie it's a perfect complement.
For a teenage boy in the 1980's, Huey Lewis was a god.
Isn't "Ghostbusters" practically part of the Huey Lewis catalog?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_(song)#Lawsuit
15 years ago when video chat with strangers was still a popular thing to do on the Internet, whenever I hosted a room, I always used the name "NumberOneBonnieTylerFan" and played her hits in the background. That you do not appreciate her music tremendously saddens me.
Neil Sedaka's Bad Blood is pretty awful in my book
The comments here are pretty funny, and do almost nothing for me more so than highlight the subjectivity of musical taste. I'd never claim to be an authority on music, but as the child of a professional musician and with chops of my own that I'd describe as "good enough to entertain myself and others at times", I love so many of the songs people are ragging on here, "We Built This City" included. Sure, there's plenty of stuff that I don't go out of my way to listen to, and again, subjective, but man, fluffy pop? Corny Christmas Music? Lewd Comedies/Parodies? It's all got it's time and place.
But that's just like, my opinion, man.
Tearing into a popular piece of media is just really, really cathartic, and much more so if a group of people agrees with you. And if we're gonna be honest its punching up most of the time, so it seems fairly harmless. Someone brought up Nickelback, its not like they've been shoved aside from relevancy, they were super popular the entire time people tore up their music critically. If someone puts them on at karaoke (or if someone puts on Starship for that matter) I'm sure most of the place is going to sing along.
OK, I get that satire is hard, but is there really nobody capable of it besides The Onion?
This article was based on a decade-old meme when it was written. That meme didn't particularly need elaboration in 2016, and here in 2024 it has been completely forgotten.
I don't think of GQ as being a great literary magazine, but I thought it had at least some pretension to it. This is weak internet-grade satire.
This 2016 article (posted on the song's 30th anniversary... we're now coming up for its 40th anniversary) is too old to note the LadBaby cover: We Built This City on Sausage Rolls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iEB8bfP7wE
"Worst Song of All Time" or not, it's still an immensely popular song. If you want to poke fun at the 80s and their obsession with synths, poke fun at Scritti Politi instead! (e.g. Boom! There She Was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QmDUkxAHgQ)
Meanwhile, the feeling of that 80s synth sound has been reimagined by modern composers, giving us synthwave and all its spinoff genres, and music videos made with an AfterEffects "VHS" plugin, like Turbo Killer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er416Ad3R1g
I assume everyone who thinks We Built This City is the worst song of all time has repressed the memory of Achy-Breaky Heart, which got at least as much radio play.
You weren’t around for the summer of “Bette Davis Eyes”…you don’t know what it was like, cuz you weren’t there, man!!
Loved that one... Achy Breaky? ((hurl))
I don't know why people rag on this song so much. It's catchy as hell and has interesting changes. I've always liked it.
It was a favorite of mine as a kid. I can still sing the whole thing, including the radio DJ part.
But I also liked Styx. So.
I probably would have liked Rush then too, but wasn’t really exposed to them until later, so they remain in the pile of culture-things I’ll simply never understand.
People bond over mutual hatred even if they didn't come to that hatred on their own. Seems like for this song, it was during slow news period when a list of worst songs came out, and it went viral. Soon it became one of those things that everyone just repeated uncritically, like your mattress doubling in weight due to dead mites. There have been many lists of worst songs before that list and many since, but once "We Built This City" took hold in the collective cultural consciousness as being the worst, there was little that could be done to change the dominate opinion.
Definitely commercial 80s cheese and mastered for a mono clock radio like most 80s soft rock but it seems a bit of hipster stretch to call this the worst or even bad.
The synth and processed drums sit in the mix reasonably well for the time frame. There are some comical 80s songs in the same time frame where the synth really doesn't sit in the mix at all but somehow it remains endearing like Europe's "Final Countdown" or even Don Henley's "Sunset Grill" or Van Halen's "Jump" all of which are rescued by other musical and production value.
Given that Van Halen was primarily a guitar player and just starting to mess with synths in his own home studio where 1984 was recorded, im gonna cut him some slack here. Not disagreeing with your assessment though, the synths on that track are cheesy and a little overwhelming.
EVH was an competition-winning piano player in his youth, and also played the drums for a bit before handing them off to Alex. Their dad was a classical musician.
I have an idea for a parody of that song called "We Bilked This City" about the non-profit industrial complex.
It would also work if it were about professional sports stadiums.
Write it!
"We bilked this city of all its dough"
This song gave Settlers of Catan players the opportunity to spend ore and (exchanged) lumber to buy a city, and then burst into "We Built This City on Rock and Wood." So it can't be all bad.
Boardgame filk versions might make it worse.
"We build this city on rock..."
"That's a good place to build a city."
"... and roll."
"We're doomed!"
Nonsense. The worst song of all time is "Wonderful Christmastime" by Paul McCartney.
(Don't believe me? Listen for yourself: https://youtu.be/94Ye-3C1FC8)
Wow, the rare double penalty. Loss of 5 yards for stooping to a Christmas song for worst song of all time debate, loss of an additional 20 yards for going with a post-Beatles McCartney track. This may be internet bullshit, but by god we have rules.
> (Don't believe me? Listen for yourself: https://youtu.be/94Ye-3C1FC8)
This may not be a felony, but it should be. Have you no shame, sir? A child could accidentally click on that link.
"Do They Know It's Christmas" usually makes the lists of terrible Christmas music as well.
So much Christmas music is repetitive, but coloring outside the lines is a tough thing to do with Christmas music. The Pogues nailed it with "Fairytale of New York", but it largely appeals only to GenX and younger.
I will literally leave a store if this is playing.
But also, the fact that you are damn near guaranteed to run into this song _yearly_ qualifies it to be way higher up than any other song on a "worst song" list (even if it weren't already at #1).
> I will literally leave a store if this is playing.
Me too. But, in fairness, that's my instinctive reaction to any Christmas music being played in a store.
Wait, what are you doing in a store at Christmas? :-)
Well, it's after the ides of October, so I daren't venture into retail until January.
I feel your use of the "ides of October" somehow reflects well on me. And "daren't" is so quaint. Perhaps we are kindred spirits.
Aaagh you monster it's only November and now that horrible aimless effected wobbly chord fever dream is stuck in my head again. I had at least another couple weeks before hearing it for the first time this year.
I never understood how something could be so bland and yet so revolting at the same time, like a smoothie made of wallpaper paste and dog shit.
>aimless effected wobbly chord fever dream
You've got to give credit to the genius of McCartney's musicianship, that songs perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being stuck in a nightmare you can't escape from.
As a musician, I sometimes make music that I don't like, but just have to get out of my head, feeling compelled to finish a track just to put that pesky musical idea to rest. Recording a track is akin to closing the lid on the coffin; there's nothing more to do, and you can move on.
I wonder if Paul had that experience with that song. The nightmarish chord line is catchy. So he got it out of his head by turning it into a track...
...and ended up getting it in our heads.
I wonder if he thinks "You complain? You can just turn it off. I had to live with that song!". We should be grateful for only being exposed to it once a year, along with the seasonal flu.
I think that McCartney’s performance of Wonderful Christmastime is absolutely dreadful.
The song itself is not bad. This can be demonstrated by listening to Tuxedo cover it (it’s on YouTube)
The Mannheim Steamroller version of "Deck the Halls" Is bloody awful.
How does he sing out of tune on his own darn song? If he's not out of tune, those awfully strained high notes shouldn't have been written in whatever weird key they're in.
For me, "I want a hippopotamus for christmas" is even worse.
Hey, when only a hippopotamus will do, what else is there?
We'd have to ask Dr. Demento.
What, would you prefer rhinoceroseses?
https://youtu.be/JP-TPCs9Fj8?feature=shared
Yeah, I mean it's pretty silly to declare something "the worst song of all time" - everyone has their personal taste and their own personal songs they love to hate. For me, it's (of course) Wham's Last Christmas and I Will Always Love You (sorry Whitney, but back in the 90s when I was watching a lot of MTV, listening to a lot of radio, and ads for Bodyguard were all over the place, I seem to have developed an allergy to this song).
And BTW, I wouldn't even call this the quintessential 80s song, for me that's Stevie Wonder's I Just Called to Say I Love You, with that cheapo synthesizer bleeping along in the background. Oh well, to quote Calvin Harris, it was "acceptable in the 80s"...
That's actually tied with Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)". Listen carefully and you can hear Yoko Ono screeching incredibly far out of tune as the piece climaxes. It's not in the forefront of the song, but it's there, and it's stuck out so much to me ever since I first noticed it.
Also, ebony and ivory. Absolutely terrible.
If this song isn't proof that Paul McCartney is a psychopath, I don't know what is. It is absolutely the most insipid, uninspired piece of garbage ever to be recorded.
Honestly, I find its wackiness quite refreshing. I will always take it over "All I want for Christmas", "Driving Home For Christmas" or "Last Christmas".
“Last Christmas” is definitely the worst. By far.
On the Xmas theme - "Little Saint Nick". That one always gets me.
It's the repetitive, bored-sounding "Christmas comes this time each year..."
Like, no shit! That's how holidays work.
I didn't coin the term and I forget who did, but "meta rock" songs are almost universally awful: rock songs about how much rock rocks.
Isn't that Tenacious D's whole premise?
Mostly. But they're also doing it as a gag, so you're expected to understand the joke is two ostensible "losers" claiming rock greatness (and doing it with a capable example of the stereotypical bombast you'd expect from the music being parodied/paid homage).
Spoiler alert: It's not the worst song of all time. There is no one single "worst song", just as there's no one single "best song". It may be one of the worst, sure. But when doing something this subjective, there's no way everyone in the world universally agrees on everything...including "worst" and "best".
I don't care how many "experts" they asked or whatever, it's not the worst song. It always bugs the heck out of me when I see clickbait crap like this. If they think "We Built This City" is worst than...say..."My Pal Foot-Foot" by The Shaggs, then it just means this writer is full of shit.
On this side-topic, Wikipedia has trouble writing e.g. "worst X of all time", because that can't ever be an objective fact... so instead it has articles named "List of X considered the worst" and "List of X notable for negative reception", to which things like "Worst X of all time" redirect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobiles_known_for_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_considered_the_w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_considered_the_w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_shows_notab...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sitcoms_known_for_nega...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_notable_fo...
In each category, it picks criteria like press reviews or user ratings that mark a work for being considered "worst"
Everyone already knows there is no objectively worse song, and the writer knows everyone knows. It's hyperbole to emphasize the writer's opinion that it's a really bad song, an inconsequential rhetorical flourish no reasonable person takes seriously.
The Shags rule. You just don't get them.
I like the song, while simultaneously have a lengthy history of enthusiastically enjoying truly intolerable indie music.
The too-cool-for-hit-pop shtick has been over for at least a decade. Hipster snark is stale, itself deeply uncool, and low IQ. I'm unsurprised that this is a GQ article. Cultural media is in a fully-terminal tailspin.
In summary, We Built This City is a great American song. Catch me at the next karaoke night.
The song I wish the radio would stop playing today is "Murder on the Dance Floor"
Something about the way the singer sings it just feels unusually soulless. After listening to it, I am completely convinced that if the DJ did kill the groove, Ellis-Baxter wouldn't give a shit.
Bloodhound gang enters the room. Ladies and gentlemen, brace yourselves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTeSkg-YIWI
I mean... objectively "10 Coolest Things about New Jersey" is a worse song, but let's not pretend Bloodhound Gang's music is meant to be taken seriously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk8hFuDoYq8
And let's be doubly fair, 'Screwing You on a Beach at Night' is a perfectly serviceable techno/dance beat. And a lot of their music is that, perfectly competent. But then they pair it with the stupidest fucking lyrics as possible. Often describing the very themes of most songs in the most crass way possible.
I mean, one of the lyrics is literally "Echo" as it echos. He's just describing the song.
[dead]
I made it as far as "your toilet parts".
Still not as vapid as Rebecca Black, though https://youtu.be/kfVsfOSbJY0?si=ruKslHtaZuKrBMP-
The lyrics are deliberately humorous. Also, that video is clearly a parody of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd-qI62gNJM
How did I never know about this?!?!
That's got nothing on "Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats. Ugh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM4okRvCg2g
Yeah...but when I started playing with Rebirth (software) in the late 90s, I remember recreating that song as I learned how to sequence drums, bass, and lead synths. It's definitely a corny song, but I needed to branch out from recreating "Blue Monday" (despite it being a better song).
This reminds me of Caillou making the top 10 most hated TV characters of all time, along with Jeffery Baratheon and Livia Soprano: https://www.reddit.com/r/caillouhate/comments/182g93j/caillo...
Why all the hate for Caillou? I personally think it's the Caillou theme song which ranks up there with "We Built This City" for irritating earworms. But there's another theory: "Bitch Caillou"
There are two "seasons" or personalities of Caillou. I'm not 100% positive which one came first, only that my kids grew up watching the kind Caillou.
The other Caillou season or personality is "Bitch Caillou." Kind Caillou was a staple of the Sprout channel on cable TV and all three of my kinds were able to enjoy this Caillou. About a year ago, PBS Kids expanded the Caillou episodes (because if you've seen Caillou, you've seen the Magnetman episode 100 fucking times) and started playing "Bitch Caillou" episodes as well.
Kind Caillou is a little four year old who learns the easy way and the hard way how to be a better sibling and about the world around him. He learns how to be nice to kids who aren't nice to him, how to clean up, try new foods, and how much fun magnets are. He also goes to an apple orchard and I love apples.
Bitch Caillou complains, cries, and is generally a little asshole of a kid you'd probably trip if he was running around the supermarket. He is rude to his sister, a smart mouth to his parents, and doesn't know a single fucking thing about sharing his toys.
I think that the Bitch Caillou episodes were the originals because everyone I know with older kids wants to kill the little bald headed brat (and the overall look is a little more simple and silly) but everyone I know with comparable aged children to my own- have seen Caillou's good side.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2mzfyj/why_do...
So, kind Caillou/bitch Caillou is basically like Jefferson Airplane giving us "White Rabbit," and Jefferson Starship delivering "We Built This City."
The fact that this song (and this incarnation of this group) has any association with "After Bathing At Baxters", "Surrealistic Pillow", "Crown of Creation" or "Blows Against the Empire" is somewhat tragic.
Clearly no one here has ever heard the song "Marching around the Number Wheel" by Hap Palmer. It's best on loop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K75cj0FmGHM
Obviously, the worst song of all time is "The Most Unwanted Song" by Dave Soldier.
I genuinely thought I was the only person on the planet who remembered that one.
Oh puhleassee.....culture gatekeepers really need to lighten up a little. The worst song ever? Heck no. I love that song. Corporation games indeed!
How can you go from 60s psychedelic rock to 80s coporate rock? It's a pretty bizarre transformation. (Well, the explanation is very likely "money".)
Its been awhile since I've seen it but Spinal Tap was making fun of a lot of bands like that, its part of their fictional band's backstory. They start out much like the Stones with some simple catchy early 60's tunes, turn into a hippie band, then quickly transform into metal in order to follow the money.
It's happened many times. Fleetwood Mac went from hard blues in the 1970s to straight pop in the 1980s. A surprising number of 1970s prog rock bands (Genesis, Yes, Rush, The Moody Blues) turned into 1980s synth pop bands.
Fleetwood Mac is a good example, actually. Regarding 1970s prog rock bands, their 80s work is for the most part still pretty original and musically honest. One notable outlier is Phil Collins whose solo stuff is truely aweful IMO. (How can you go from being the drummer of Genesis to writing "A Groovy Kind of Love"?)
It's not the worst—it's the greatest bad song of all time. :-D
Just remembered "Rico Suave," gonna nominate that one as well.
Love Shack is objectively the worst song of all time.
Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) is worse, and way overplayed by FM radio in my town.
Well we wouldn't have Opie and Anthony's parody of it without the original. It made it all worth it
For those complaining that it's not "the worst song of all time," yes, we all know it's not the worst song. This includes the clickbaiters who claim it is.
It's cheesy, it's simple, Grace Slick hates it. All those factors make it fashionable to hate it, and it's been like that for a long time. However, it's also catchy, fun, and the lyrics are easy to remember. It's a karaoke staple for all those reasons, good and bad.
I mean, how can this song be the worst song?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRE-LYqwAi8
I first heard this song a few month ago in a Japanese mall. It fit quite well I have to say.
Jefferson Airplane was amazing. They should have quit while they were ahead.
I'm honestly glad we don't live in the universe where Bryan Danielson chose 'We Built The City' as his Ring of Honor entrance music.
I've honestly always thought that song is weirdly bad considering how popular it is.
Glad to know I'm not alone.
I... kind of like it, honestly.
Focusing on the "worst ever" is sociopathic. These people do not want entertainment at all, they have a completely foreign agenda.
[dead]
This is ridiculous clap trap. Why did you submit this here?
I'm flagging it just because the website is not readable at all, even with an adblocker. The content is completely blocked with popups.
Did not see a single popup - looking at the list 5 trackers and 3 add blocked.
Looks perfectly fine. Get a better adblocker or enable more rules.