Starship: We Built This City - On Solid Gold – 1985 (My "Stereo Studio Sound" Re-Edit)

Starship: We Built This City - On Solid Gold – 1985 (My "Stereo Studio Sound" Re-Edit)
"We Built This City" is a 1985 song by American rock band Starship, the debut single from the album Knee Deep in the Hoopla. It was written by English musicians Martin Page and Bernie Taupin, who were both living in Los Angeles at the time, and was originally intended as a lament against the closure of many of that city's live music clubs.

The song peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Outside the United States, "We Built This City" topped the charts in Australia and Canada, peaked inside the top 10 of the charts in Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland, the top 20 on the charts in Belgium, New Zealand and the United Kingdom and the top 30 of the charts in Austria and the Netherlands.

The song has gained significant scorn, both for the inscrutability of its lyrics (notably the line "Marconi plays the mamba"), and for the contrast between the song's anti-corporate message and its polished, "corporate rock" sound. It topped a 2011 Rolling Stone poll of worst songs of the 1980s by a wide margin, and the magazines Blender and GQ both called it the worst song of all time.

Song cowriters Martin Page and Bernie Taupin have stated that the song is about the decline of live-performance clubs in Los Angeles during the 1980s. The lyrics are structured as a plea to corporate interests who are shutting down rock music clubs ("We just want to dance here/ Someone stole the stage") because the corporations are concerned only with profits and respectability ("Too many runaways"), and have forgotten that rock music was what first brought people to the city ("Don't you remember? We built this city on rock and roll!").

Though the song was originally written about Los Angeles, the Starship rendition references San Francisco (the hometown of both Starship and its predecessors, Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship) with a spoken-word interlude in which a radio DJ states, "I'm looking out over that Golden Gate Bridge". However, the DJ then says, "Here's your favorite radio station in your favorite radio city, the city by the bay, the city that rocks, the city that never sleeps", stressing the universality of the message: while "the city by the bay" is a nickname for San Francisco, the other two phrases are not, and "The City That Never Sleeps" is a well-known nickname for New York City. Capitalizing on the ambiguity, several radio stations added descriptions of their own local areas when they broadcast the song or added their own ident in its place.

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

The song was engineered by producer Bill Bottrell, written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert and Peter Wolf and arranged by Bottrell and Jasun Martz. The song was based on a demo by Page and Taupin with a darker feel and based on how clubs were dying in Los Angeles, leaving live performers without work. Wolf reworked the song's arrangement with a more upbeat tone.

The song features Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick sharing lead vocals. MTV executive and former DJ Les Garland provided the DJ voice-over during the song's bridge. Additionally, some radio stations, with the help of jingle company JAM Creative Productions, inserted their own opening lines to promote their stations.